The Cosmopolicast

The title is just for now. Until we think of a better one.

Give it a try. It’s only twenty minutes. It’s an experiment. We’re thinking that if you like this—or if you can imagine liking it, if we make it better in some (achievable and realistic) way—we’ll do it daily.

We figured we could both spare about twenty minutes every day to talk about the global news stories that stand out most to us. So today, we talked about Germany’s OpSec Screwup of the Century and Haiti’s descent into even more total anarchy.

If you like it, let us know. If you don’t like it, let it grow on you a bit before deciding you’ll never listen to it again. We’ll almost certainly get better at it with practice.

Read about it:

* Gleeful Russia relishes German Taurus leak scandal: The Kremlin is jubilant after humiliating Berlin by revealing top-secret missile talks.

* Haiti declares state of emergency after double jailbreak allows thousands of inmates to escape.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

While you’re at it, read every word of this analysis for RUSI:

It is obvious that if Ukraine loses support from the West, Putin may well achieve his goal of destroying Ukrainians as a people and erasing the largest country from the map of Europe. Despite the obvious tragedy of this situation for Ukraine, the consequences of its defeat for the West and especially for the US as the leader of the free world would be no less catastrophic. …

Every word of the analysis is correct. We’re on the edge of the abyss.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

While you’re at it, read every word of this analysis for RUSI:

It is obvious that if Ukraine loses support from the West, Putin may well achieve his goal of destroying Ukrainians as a people and erasing the largest country from the map of Europe. Despite the obvious tragedy of this situation for Ukraine, the consequences of its defeat for the West and especially for the US as the leader of the free world would be no less catastrophic. …

Every word of the analysis is correct. We’re on the edge of the abyss.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Vladislav Davidzon has for almost a decade been one of the most acute observers of the Ukrainian–Jewish relationship and of the place of Ukrainian Jewry within a developing political nation. His stylish reportage has been invaluable for understanding the dynamics of the Jewish Ukraine in a historical moment. This volume will surely enter the canon as an important document for anyone who wishes to understand this moment.—Wolf Moskovich

A masterful chronicler of the real odyssey of the Ukrainian Jew amidst revolutionary times!—Simon Sebag Montefiore

Claire: Hi! This is Claire Berlinski with the Cosmopolicast. We have Vladislav Davidzon back again to discuss his new book, which I just read, and Vlad—I loved it. I loved it. 

Vlad: Oh, wonderful! Thank you. 

Claire: I have to say, I was sort of wondering, “Am I really going to enjoy reading this?” Yesterday evening, when I thought I was kind of under pressure to read it quickly and just wasn’t sure I was in the mood for a book about Jews and Ukraine and Ukraine and Jews—I couldn’t put it down. I loved it. It’s so … well, let me back up a little bit. Why don’t you introduce your book, and I’ll add a few comments after you’ve told people what it’s about?

Vlad: Hi, Claire. Thank you so much for having me on again. So. To my neighbor Claire and friend—we live close to each other in Paris, in an undisclosed neighborhood, although I’m sure every intelligence agency that wants to know where it is that we live already has our locations. 

We are celebrating the publication of my second book. It’s called  The Birth of a Political Nation. It’s about Jews and Ukrainians. It’s a selection of my best and most interesting pieces on this perennial theme between 2013 and 2023. So, ten years of my best pieces. I selected 20, 22 of my most interesting articles—the ones I think are most useful—and added new stuff, padded them out, and created a narrative. 

Claire: Yeah, it all fits together. It fits together as a book. 

Vlad: Absolutely, right? You can tell that it does, right? That’s the point.

Claire: I mean, it’s really linked—anyone who’s in any way interested in modern Ukraine, and who, because of the war, has heard a great deal about Ukraine but doesn’t really know what this country is like—this book will—well, I feel like I’ve been there now. 

Vlad: No writer could get higher praise. 

Claire: Oh, well, they could, actually. I mean the introduction from Bernard-Henri Lévy is pretty good. 

Vlad: I love it. I rather love it, but some people might think I’m a bit of a character having read it.

Claire: I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You were telling people about the book. 

Vlad: So the book, yes, the book is a collection of my thoughts. It is about …

It is about politics. 

It is about memory politics. 

It is about trauma. 

It is about minority rights. 

It is about politics with a big P and politics with a small p. 

It is about history. 

It is about Russian propaganda. 

It is about Putin’s obsessiveness. 

It is about the key to understanding this conflict, which is [that there are] two different conceptions of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Slavic state, post-Soviet. 

On the Russian side, you have a markedly totalitarian, authoritarian, centralized autarky that has difference—in terms of particularity—subsumed to an autarkic idea of the state.

On the other side, you have a liberal, democratic, very messy conception of a modern polity, in the middle of Europe, one of, actually the most liberal, in many ways, and one of the most multi-ethnic, certainly in the terraformed-after-Hitler lands of the bloodlands in Eastern Europe, whatever you want to call it, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, right? 

So you have two different conceptions of how to run a Slavic, post-Soviet state with a lot of different kinds of people living in it. That’s the same with Russia.  Russia is also a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, multi-racial, multicultural, multi-religious state. 

And you have two different ideas of how to run it. And you have two different generations of people. One, a Soviet regime—the Putin regime in its sixties. And then you have the liberal, democratic Zelensky political regime, a liberal regime, which is in its forties. 

So you have two different ideas and two different generations fighting over what the future of an Eastern European post-Soviet state will be. And the Jews, as people, as an idea, as an apparition, as a figure of speech, and a figure of image—of literature and history and propaganda—are in the middle of this. So you have, you know, even if you’re not interested in Jews, it’s a very interesting book about memory politics. 

Claire: Absolutely. The central thesis of the book is that if you understand the story of Ukrainian Jewry over the last decade since the Maidan Revolution, you understand the development of Ukraine as a modern nation-state. And as I was reading it, I thought—

Vlad: —Absolutely. Well said. Thank you. I wish—can I actually have that?  I'm sending the last proofs in to the editor today. I can actually get that on the back cover. Would you like that? 

Claire: Yes, absolutely. Um—you’re sending the last proofs? Because I found some typos. I wasn’t going to mention them to you. 

Vlad: Would you please send them now? 

Claire: I didn’t realize. I thought it was too late. Yeah, I’ll send you a complete—

Vlad: —Please send me the typos immediately, Claire. Immediately. 

Claire: —I didn’t realize that it wasn’t too late, so I just wasn’t going to tell you. 

Vlad: You’re working with a pre-final edit PDF. We’re sending the last edit to—

Claire: But the draft I have is the one you’re working from?

Vlad: The draft you have is—yeah, indeed, it is the one that you’re working on. I mean, I copyedited it, my friends copyedited it. I mean, the people on the podcast don’t care about this.

Claire: —If you order this book today, how long will it take to get to you? 

Vlad: The book will be out in a month. I imagine people will get it in six weeks, five or six weeks.

Claire: But they can pre-order it now. 

Vlad: Totally, they should pre-order it right now. 

Claire: They really should pre-order it. I just wanted to say something about that. It is not an inexpensive book. It’s US$42. 

Vlad: Speaking of which, right before this, since we’re right in the final things, we are lowering the price. 

Claire: Really? 

Vlad: I think US$31 or US$30, because the people at the Columbia University Press decided that I’m just that cool, that I can sell—

Claire: And I think a book like this—the price is going to be very elastic. A lot more people will buy it if—

Vlad: Yeah, I mean that’s why we’re lowering the price. …. Come, step right up, step right up. We’re lowering the price. One time only. Come to Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. Home of the Dodgers. Home of Vladislav Davidzon. Home of Donald Trump and Frum Trump. Come, step right up, step right up—

Claire: Get your Jews, get your Ukrainians—

Vlad: Get your Jews, get your Jews, get your hot dogs—

Claire: I was just saying, for me, US$30 is still an expensive book. For me, that’s not an impulse purchase. An impulse purchase, for me, is five dollars. That’s how much I think a book should cost. But I’m aware that I’m—that this is completely out of step with with modern book publishing. Nonetheless, I’m going to tell people—

Vlad: —You could steal books, also, Claire. There are people who believe that— 

Claire: —Yeah, that’s grotesque. You should buy it because it’s a beautiful book, first. Because it’s got lots Vlad’s artwork in it, and it’s really worth it. I mean, most people will need to be convinced, a little bit. But I really think it’s worth US$30 to read this book. It’s given me a better insight into Ukrainian culture than any other book I’ve read. And I think that’s important, because people outside of Ukraine are connecting to Ukraine as a culture war totem, or an abstract idea. But this brought the people alive, and it brought the culture alive. And perhaps now I think of it, a little bit too much, like Brooklyn. But it really brought a rich, vibrant culture to life. 

And to the extent that you can measure the health, the moral health of a society by its treatment of Jews—

Vlad: —and minorities in general. It’s a heuristic for treatment of minorities. Jews are of course the ultimate minority. 

Claire: I think Jews are a really good measure because Jews are always the ones who are persecuted first. Right? 

Vlad: So, we’re noticeable. 

Claire: Yeah.

Vlad: We’re complicated. And we’re economically productive. 

Claire: It’s not a huge community of Jews—a quarter of a million, right? 

Vlad: Look, here’s the thing, no one really knows the numbers. I mean, some people say as much as a million if you count a lot of people who don’t know that they’re Jewish, who find out that they’re Jewish late in life.  There are a lot of people who are halfsies, who are quarters. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine—much less now because of the war, because the population of Ukraine has been emptied out by refugee flows. There are a lot of Jews, now, from Ukraine in Brooklyn and Florida and Israel and Russia, if they were on the other side of the divide—if they were on the other side of the border. It’s like three million Ukrainian refugees into Russia because they were on the other side of the country, that’s where you could fly to. A lot of them in Poland, because there are millions of Ukrainians in Poland and Ukrainian Jews are Ukrainians, after all. 

Claire: And the way you describe it, it’s a big, boisterous community. It’s a very Jewish Jewish community with lots of—you know, no one’s hiding it.  No one’s ashamed of it. 

Vlad: Some people are. And some people for them, it’s not important, including some people who’ve been prime minister recently. No names. The current president, of course, is a Jew and he doesn’t hide it.  He’s very elegantly deployed it during the war for the greater good. 

And there are a lot of Jews. Unlike Poland. unlike Hungary. Unlike other Eastern and Central European states where the Nazis were more successful in terraforming the landscape. There are a lot of Jews in Ukraine, and it’s a Jewish country, with a large Jewish diaspora still, just like Russia. 

Claire: What’s remarkable is that this has occurred in a country that is, for most Jews, synonymous with anti-Semitism. 

Vlad: Which is something that I’d really like to change, by the way. 

Claire: Well, you can’t change the history. But certainly it sounds as if Ukraine has changed—

Vlad: —I would like, to be very precise, for Ukraine to stop being synonymous with Jew-hatred. That’s something that I’m working on. That’s something that I think of as my mandate. That’s something that is part of my life’s work.  I’m not the only one who cares about this, but it’s important to me. 

Claire: It’s important. It is important. Gosh, just the other day, I think, we had a reader cancel a subscription because he had lost relatives in Ukraine and found the idea of supporting Ukraine, militarily, intolerable. 

Vlad: Please give me his email and phone number. I will personally email him and call him and have a nice conversation with him. He could be Polish. If he’s a Jewish gentleman, I would like to have a personal conversation with him. I will hunt down and have a personal, intimate conversation with every single Jew in the Ashkenazi, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, Ukrainian, French-speaking world and explain to them why this is important, one by one. 

Claire: All right. Well, let’s talk about the book, because there’s lots of points here that I really wanted to talk about with you. First of all, this introduction by BHL [Bernard Henri-Lévy]—it’s just beautiful. He really got you. 

Vlad: He likes me. 

Claire: He does, he loves you. 

BHL is a French intellectual, a very well-known French intellectual who, well—perhaps this will be demoralizing for you to hear, but when he shows up at a conflict, you know someone’s about to be genocided. He’s usually on the [morally] right side of things. 

Vlad: He’s great. 

Claire: He’s absolutely great in many ways. 

Vlad: I love him. 

Claire: Except when it comes to cats. 

Vlad: Look, it’s okay. Maybe he has an allergy. It’s okay. 

Claire: I realized that to read BHL and appreciate him, you have to read him out loud.  If you just read him on the page, to the Anglophone ear, he’s unbearably pretentious. But I discovered—because I was reading a book I was supposed to review out loud—that he sounds much better if you read him out loud. 

Vlad: It actually is the way it’s meant to be read. Because he’s an orator. He’s an orator and an oracular writer. 

Claire: Exactly! Exactly!

Vlad: He’s telling a story in an eighteenth-, nineteenth-century oracular oratory tradition. And it just doesn’t translate perfectly from French, because of the cadences—it just doesn’t translate perfectly from French. And if a lot more people ever read him in French, or read the better parts of his of his oeuvre—which are more poetic parts, less political parts—out loud, they would understand that this is a kind of oracular syncretic storyteller, who’s singing a beautiful song. 

Claire: Can I read a little bit of the introduction? 

Vlad: Please do.

Claire: It’s just a wonderful introduction. He says, “Vlad came into my life upon my return from Ukraine in 2014.” I’m going to skip a little bit. “... From Paris to Kyiv, from Tangiers to the south of France and New York, I have gotten to know this start-up intellectual, as mischievous as a child and fascinated by rakes, with a devilish laugh and a taunting gaze, arrogant and clever, impulsive but never credulous, ambitious but indecisive, erudite and poetic—” I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever received a love letter nicer than that. 

Vlad: I mean, any woman who got a love letter like that has to go to bed with a man who sent it to her. 

Claire: “ … Was he a poet or a dilettante, a devil or a dandy? … Was he American or European? Uzbek, Russian, or Ukrainian? Was he bragging when he declared that on the day Russia invaded Ukraine (for he was one of the few people I know who, like me, never doubted that the day would come) he would tear up his Russian passport in front of Putin’s embassy in Paris?”—Well, we know you weren’t bragging because we went together to do that. 

Vlad: Thank you yet again, Claire. 

Claire: [reading]—“Solid as a rock, brave, funny … ”

Vlad: I’ll take it, I’ll take it!

Claire: Yeah, I want to keep reading from it because it’s just so lovely. Oh! “Here was straight Oscar Wilde—the straight Oscar Wilde—converted overnight into the most curious, intrepid, and acute of war reporters without ever giving up the stylish pouch he wore with the bullet-proof vest, without forgoing his matching jacket and socks, and, above all, without sacrificing anything of his humor and composure.”

He goes on—I don’t want to spend the whole time on this—but he goes on to say that for certain people, a certain historic event brings together all of their talents and all of their insights and—um, how does he put it exactly? Where does he say it? ….

—A historical event that everything within you sensed approaching, an event that once it occurs pulls together the scattered thoughts, brings back dreams from childhood, awakens unused strengths, imparts an aspiration to greatness that prior circumstances had not allowed to emerge. In short, an event that mobilizes and crystallizes the most secret and noble part of the soul.

And he says: The war in Ukraine is your war. 

Vlad: And by the way, it’s totally correct, by the way.  I went full Lord Byron. I mean, I didn’t even know how crazy and how intense and how amazingly insane I was, and how deeply Slavic I was, and all the ways that my grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought during the wars. Yeah, the war. You really discover who you are at war. I had no idea how focused and intense and just like—I felt no fear. I just, you know, I just moved with total brazenness until I burned out after about six months. But of course, everyone does. That’s why we rotate people out.

Claire: But you just came back from Ukraine. 

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah. 

Claire: And I think you should tell our listeners about that. 

Vlad: Well, you know—I just came back from Odessa and Uman. I was there for Uman. 

Claire: Yeah, tell them about Uman.

Vlad: Oh my God, I’m writing an article now about my dear friend Luzer Tversky, who played the Baal Shem Tov, he’s an American actor in a film called Dovbush and we went to Oman for Rosh Hashanah, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, in order to find his long lost sons. He got divorced at the age of 21. He lost custody of the boys and he hadn’t seen them until his late thirties. He wanted to find the 17-year-old son and tell him that he had his blessing before his wedding day. 

Claire: Tell our listeners about Uman. I mean, you’ve got a chapter here describing it. You describe it as the Burning Man of Jews. 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Burning Man of Jews is about right. Yeah, it’s just an insane place to be. It’s full of searchers and very religious, very frum people, but also just a lot of hippies—I mean, someone asked me to translate for the cops. She was this large-bosomed Persian-American girl, with an Israeli passport, who’  was just a hippie or a weirdo of some sort. And I translated for her for the police, because she was arguing with a German camera guy. And in exchange for my help she said, you know, “I have an NGO called ‘Weed the Homeless,’ and in exchange for your help, I’d like to give you this brick of hashish.”

There’s a lot really drugged up people. There’s a lot of people who are high on narcotics.

Claire: Really?

Vlad: Oh yeah.

Claire: So it really is like Burning Man.

Vlad: Oh yeah, yeah. There are a lot of people high on their own supply, which is fantasia and mysticism, and on the atmosphere, but there are a lot of people who are running around are just really high on drugs.

Claire: That kind of surprises me.

Vlad: Why?

Claire: I don’t know. Maybe it shouldn’t. Yeah, it shouldn’t.

Vlad: It’s mysticism. There are a lot of secular Israelis, a lot of Israeli guys, Sephardi guys come, tough guys who like a good party.  They’re fairly secular, very traditional. It’s really interesting how this Ashkenazi mysticism, this Hasidic mysticism became kind of an Arab-Jewish-Sephardi thing. 

Claire: For those of our listeners who might not know who Nachman was, or why all these people are making this pilgrimage, why don’t you just briefly explain what this is? 

Vlad: So the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was a mystic from the Carpathian Mountains in the eighteenth century, early eighteenth century, about 300 years ago, 350 years ago, something like that, maybe 320, and he had a great-grandson, one of the many expositors of his values. The mystical expositor of his values was the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who codified a very happy version of mystical Judaism, where you worship God not by studying and textual criticism, studying the Torah, but instead dancing and drinking and fornicating and having fun and being close to God through your mysticism. So it was a very peasant form of mysticism. 

Claire: Did Jews not dance before that? Because I thought dancing was always part of being a Jew. 

Vlad: I think it was always a part of being a Jew, but not like these guys did it. These guys just really made dancing into a theology. I mean, they stripped the theology and they kept the dancing. 

Claire: Yeah, so it’s a much more intense, personal, mystical kind of Judaism. 

Vlad: Correct. 

Claire: And this is kind of the world from which Isaac Bashevis Singer comes, isn’t it? 

Vlad: Sure, yeah, and a lot of other people. This is a very mountain Jew, Eastern European phenomenon, which reached its hypothesis in the nineteenth century and then of course was destroyed by Hitler. They were very badly prepared for Hitler. They were wearing black coats, they didn’t have an education, they didn’t know languages outside of Hebrew and Yiddish. Some of them knew Russian and Ukrainian. But the Hasidim were the most open toward—I mean, like open target. Not open, but they were the most openly targeted because they were easiest to get. They were wearing black hats and black coats, and they were not very worldly. They were either eradicated or wound up in Israel, or Antwerp, or the UK—or mostly New York City, New York State. 

Claire: Well, some obviously survived in Ukraine. How many actually survived and have been living there continuously? 

Vlad: Well, some of them survived and had to give up their religiosity and become Soviet citizens. They couldn't operate as Hasidism throughout Soviet times.  There were no black hats in Soviet times, obviously. There was an interregnum, about eighty years, where you couldn’t behave like that. And in that same way, when Uman was forbidden as a place of pilgrimage, during Soviet times, very intrepid and very brave dissident types would go there on Rosh Hashanah. It was a place where in the eighties, I think by the late seventies, certainly by the early eighties, a lot of very intrepid travelers would travel. 

Claire: What happens? The Soviet Union collapses, and then do people who have been—

Vlad: It dissolved, Claire. By the way. One of my pet peeves is when people say “collapse.” It dissolved, actually. Relatively painlessly, until now. Unlike Yugoslavia, or the Turkish Empire, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet dissolution was actually relatively bloodless. There were regional wars between Georgia and the Armenians and the Azeris, there were wars in the Caucasus. And there was a war, obviously, between the Chechens and the Russians. But for the most part—other than, clearly, the invasion of Moldova and all that—for the most part, the Russians took fifteen years off before inflicting the pain of the collapse, of losing the Empire, on the rest of us. The invasion of Georgia, the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians—you know, they took fifteen years off in order to deal with their own stuff. Obviously, these are the final earthquakes of the collapse of the Empire. The Empire has been dissolving for thirty years. It didn’t happen overnight. Empires are very big. They live a different lifespan than people do, right?  So I don’t like it when people say “collapsed.” It dissolved. At first peacefully, but it turns out, not so peacefully. We thought—and I say this in the introductory article—that we had avoided the bloodletting of Yugoslavia—and the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish Empires—upon its dissolution into national states. That was not the case. 

Claire: Explain to me, when the Soviet Empire dissolves, were the Jews in Ukraine—had they been practicing this secretly? Or did they return from Israel, or from abroad, to come back to revive this tradition? 

Vlad: Well, so here, so for the most part, they were all secularized. Like, let’s say, 97, 99 percent of them were secularized. Some, obviously, a million and a half, have been killed during the Holocaust. Let’s say another million or so left to Israel and America, including my own family in the eighties and nineties. And then a lot went to Germany. You had a couple of hundred thousand people left, out of a community of several million. Hitler had his solution to the quote-unquote “problem.” Stalin’s solution was to make them good Soviet citizens and destroy their culture. And some of them went to America, from the safety perspective. That was, actually, over the twentieth century, the correct choice. Some of them went to Israel and they became Israelis. That was a Zionist solution. And the ones that stayed had to give up Judaism in order to become Soviet citizens. 

Claire: How did they revive this culture? I assume there were no pilgrimages under the Soviet Union? 

Vlad: Well, I mean, the rabbis and Israeli Mossad guys that I talked to who started doing it started doing it in the late eighties when the system was collapsing.  They started coming in the late eighties. There was a kind of general, let’s say, American—the gold rush for souls, to mix metaphors. In the nineties, there were a lot of people who came, from all religious backgrounds, especially evangelical, to fish for souls in the former Soviet republics. And there was a general religious revival in all fifteen Soviet republics, because religion is part of human nature and part of a normal, ordinary, orderly human society. And people need clerics, and it has a special place in social structure—obviously, you’re not going to get rid of religion. We tried, in the Soviet Union. That experiment failed. And all across the Soviet Union, you had religious revival. Uneven: In some places more than others. In some places, the church or the mosque became captured by the state—let’s say, Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan. Or Russia, for that matter. In some places that process was stalled, because they never went through decommunization: Belarus. In some places it was normal, because people just returned to having a normal country, like the Baltic success stories. In Ukraine, it was a mixed story, because so many people just didn’t come back to religiosity.  Most people in Ukraine are still mostly secular, and most Jews are mostly secular. And when the American missionaries came in the nineties, they mostly did their work not in the West, which was deeply Catholic and Greco-Catholic; they did their work in the south and the east, both in the Christian and the Jewish missionary communities. They worked mostly in the Donbas and in the south. 

Claire: Was the pilgrimage to Uman invented then? Or had that been a regular occurrence before the Soviets? 

Vlad: I think it was a regular occurrence. I don't know about Russian Imperial times. It’s a great question actually. It was something that people did during late Soviet times and during the nineties, it became a big thing. So I’ve been a couple of times. 

Claire: So it’s possible that this historic annual pilgrimage is something—sort of a recent invention? 

Vlad: In its modern version of 35,000 people and, like, a Jewish discotheque of drugs, yes, certainly that’s very modern. 

Claire: So did you feel the religious … did you feel the mysticism? 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah, it’s very, it’s always very intense. I mean, it’s very, very, very intense. It’s like a—it’s like a little, very intense version of Bnei Brak in Brooklyn plopped down—Bnei Brak is where the Orthodox live in Jerusalem—plopped down in the middle of Ukraine. It has a very Israeli atmosphere, I would say, despite the fact there’s a lot of Hasidim and Brooklyn Hasidim. It’s just a very Israeli, kind of harried, atmosphere—like the kebab stands are run by Israelis, andrun in Israeli fashion. The businesses are run Israeli-fashion. It’s very—it’s very deeply Israeli, in that sense. Like you know, a secular-religious version of a syncretic-secular-Jewish culture. 

Claire: Well, it sounds like things are going better in that regard in Ukraine than they are in Israel, if you’ve seen the news. It’s just awful.  Fights broke out on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv over Yom Kippur over the segregation of the sexes. 

Vlad: Yes, I did notice that. I mean, there’s segregation of the sexes in Uman also, but that’s voluntary. Go ahead— 

Claire: —No, go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt. 

Vlad: I went to find my friend’s sons with him. He had not seen his sons in two years. I’m writing an article about this now. It’ll come out in Tablet. 

Claire: You just got back how many days ago? 

Vlad: About three days ago, from Ukraine. 

Claire: I want to talk to you about this great interview that you have with Borislav Bereza. Is that how you pronounce it?

Vlad: Bereza, yeah, yeah. My friend who’s now a member—he lost his parliamentary seat in 2019, he was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament 2014 to 2019. He was, like, a straight-up—he was the spokesman for Right Sector. He was a Jewish guy. He was the spokesman for Right Sector. Right Sector is a nationalist, a very nationalist organization. 

Claire: Well, when people say that the far-right isn’t very powerful in Ukraine, they’ll say things like, “Look, the Right Sector only got this tiny percentage of the vote.”

Vlad: —And their spokesman was an Orthodox Jew. 

Claire: And that’s the part that's mind-blowing. The spokesman is an Orthodox Jew. So these Nazis—I mean, this is the group that makes people say, “Ukraine is full of Nazis”—

Vlad: —I was like, “What about the Nazi stuff?” And he’s like, “Bro.” He’s a tough guy, he served in the Israeli Defense Force, he’s a tough guy. He says, “Bro, what are you talking about? We have ultra right-wing patriots of every race, of every creed, of every color.”

Claire: The interview itself conveys how surreal this is. 

Vlad: Yeah, that was from 2014. I think he’s really playing it up to the crowd. But yes, it’s not unrepresentative of that moment, of his moment and him.  I have to point out the Right Sector has been somewhat folded into other organizations. It’s declined. Other right-wing patriotic organizations are much more important now. It was run like a McDonald’s, unlike Azov, or something else. It was run like, basically, a chain franchise. And every Right Sector, in every town, was run by different guys. And a lot of those Right Sectors, it was just a local militia, paramilitary, crime groupuscoule that took on the name Right Sector. There was not one Right Sector. And by 2017-18, Right Sectors decline, now it’s not really as important.  There’s still people in organizations that call themselves Right Sector, but a lot of them have been dismantled by the Ukrainian intelligence services because they became, basically, foreign bandit structures. 

Claire: What I found, among the things that I found interesting about the interview was his defense of Bandera. 

Vlad: It’s great, yeah. 

Claire: It’s great. I mean, it’s obviously a bit revisionist. But it does suggest how Ukrainians view Bandera. It’s so repellent, from the outside, because we know who he is. But they obviously do not have an accurate historical portrait of him. 

Vlad: Well, first of all, yeah—there’s a lot to say on that. Yeah, they don’t know who Bandera was, first of all.  Secondly, there’s a lot of Soviet propaganda about Bandera, so when they embrace Bandera, it’s like a “Screw you” to the Russian-Soviet mentality and Soviet narrative. That’s one thing. Another thing is that Bandera is a pet project of certain ideological people, without naming their names, who came to power in 2014 with the Poroshenko administration. And it was really a regional phenomenon that captured, in national memory politics, the country overall. So Bandera is not something that anyone in Chernihiv or Odessa, in the South—Chernihiv is in the north—or certainly in Kharkiv, care about. He has nothing to do with the history of the Donbas, even very, very, very right-wing Ukrainian nationalists from Donbas cities like Mariupol or Lugansk or Donetsk.  They have other heroes that they’re more into. You talk to really, really, really right-wing Ukrainian guys or, you know, whatever, patriotic guys from these—you know, groupuscules or, you know, the guys who fight in the military conflicts—and they don’t care about Bandera. Bandera is very much a Western Ukrainian thing that was hoisted, in terms of memory policy, onto the rest of the country. In a perfect world, that would not be the historical antecedent for resistance that the Ukrainians would look at. 

Claire: It’s not doing Ukrainians any favors, because people who want to—

Vlad: Well, here’s the thing. As a Ukrainian Jew, I accept Bandera. It’s  Shukhevich and other people who I don’t like. They’re much worse characters. than Bandera, one. Two, I like the Zhytomyr-Bandera flag. I wore my red-and-black Zhytomyr-Bandera flag with a red-and-black Magen David in Uman and I had—Israelis were like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m a Zhytomyr-Bandera.” And they’re like, “What the hell? Bandera is good?”  I said, “No. I mean, this is post-Bandera. This is appropriation.”

Claire: There’s two Banderas.  There’s the historic Bandera and there’s the Bandera who symbolizes something modern, and has nothing to do with the historic Bandera. 

Vlad: Correct. I mean, yes. 

Claire: But I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read your book. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right.  The valorization of OUN is, as the kids nowadays say, problematic. But also, you know, there’s a war on and I’m not going to tell Ukrainians whose statues to put up. I went to see Zelensky’s first prime minister, without naming his name, a week before the war started. I was doing the rounds in Kyiv, seeing politicians, you know, seeing who’s going to do what during the war. It was already obvious that there was going to be a war. And it was, like, a week before the war started, and I went to see Zelensky’s former prime minister, a technocratic prime minister. I said, “What do you think about Bandera?”

We had a long conversation. He’s like, “Well, it’s our history.”

I was like, “Yeah. I know. I know.”

And that was—that’s symbolized, for me, the reaction, which was like—shrug—“Well, that’s our history.” And I said, “We respect that. Yeah, I respect that as a Ukrainian Jew.” Ukrainian Jews mostly don’t care. It’s outsider Jews who care. It’s Russian Jews who make an issue of it, and it’s Poles for whom it’s a real problem, you know? 

Claire: Yeah.

Vlad: Look, I have a friend who is a hipster, he’s an Odessa-born conceptual artist, he’s a hipster, he lives in Berlin, he makes conceptual art, he’s my friend, and he once made a jocular—it was very hilarious—Bandera-themed musical, and the theme song of the song, written by my friend, a Jew from Odessa, a conceptual artist, was, “Was he a villain or was he a hero?”

Claire: I just want to read one little bit of this interview before moving on to the next chapter. You ask him, you say to the Right Sector spokesman, “The Right Sector is also often accused of being quite reactionary on the question of LGBT rights, gay rights. What’s your relationship personally and also as a party toward gays?” And he says:

The infringement of LGBT rights is, much like anti-Semitism, a real and substantive problem. But I don’t know of a single country where homophobia doesn’t exist. I do not know of a country where there are no homophobes or xenophobes. Such people exist everywhere. Personally, I have no issues with LGBT and think this is a matter of personal freedom. … Yet even more than that, I, personally, want to go on the record as saying that I love the work of Freddie Mercury.

Vlad: Yeah, he’s a deeply parodical character. He’s got a left earring, and he’s got a cool jacket on. He’s like, “I love the gays. Right Sector, we love the gays.”

Claire: You tell him, “You come off as an honest guy and I believe you.” Did you believe everything he said? 

Vlad: In the moment, I don’t know what to think. 

Claire: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Vlad: I now know better. Anyway, he was reprimanded by the Central Committee of Right Sector right after this interview for unsanctioned statements about the gays. And then he was like—he was saying that about Freddie Mercury. Right Sector’s Central Committee and Politburo does not favor these comments in favor of Freddie Mercury. 

Claire: Alright, so the next chapter—I really admire the way you do this, it flows pretty naturally because you introduce Sheptytsky, is that how you pronounce it? 

Vlad: Yeah, Sheptytsky. Teah. And I write a lot about Sheptytsky in the book, yeah. 

Claire: Yeah, and it seems like you did a lot of archival research? Is this all your own research or are you drawing on the work of other scholars? You don’t have to answer that. 

Vlad: Look, I did talk to scholars. In fact, one very pedantic scholar accused me of, “This is such primitive reductionist garbage … ”  And I was like, “Welcome to journalism, brother.” I read everything that there was. A scholarly history in English, some in Ukrainian. I don’t read Polish very well, so I talked to sources who were au courant of the Polish scholarship. 

Claire: Yeah, yes. I just wanted to mention this—skipping around a little bit, but just before I forget it, there’s the incredible fact that on invading Crimea, Putin announced proudly, “The Jews there can now celebrate Rosh Hashanah again.”

Vlad: He’s like, “We’re doing it for the Jews. Now our brothers, the Jews, can celebrate Passover.” It was great. 

Claire: They’re looking at each other and saying, “We do this every year.”

Vlad: They do this every year. And what was funny was that the Chabad rabbis, it’s split Chabad down the middle, because the Chabad rabbis, they’re cousins, brothers, and brothers-in-law, and they’re all married to each other. And you literally had a split between the Russian and Ukrainian Chabad.  I don’t write about this in the book. It’s fascinating. And the rabbi in this aforementioned synagogue in Sevastopol was literally like the cousin of the rabbi in Kharkiv and the second cousin of a rabbi in Odessa by marriage. And they all had to put out competing statements in order to make the secular authorities in their new country happy. Which is always the case with Jews, you know? 

Claire: Did you see the, what is his status, the chief rabbi in Ukraine?  He put out a Frank Sinatra—him, singing Frank Sinatra, for Yom Kippur—

Vlad: Which one? Do you mean Dov Bleich? 

Claire: The one with the big bushy beard. 

Vlad: Oh yes, he’s very nice also. He’s a star now. I guess he wasn’t expecting that. So there are a couple of chief rabbis. We’re talking about Moshe Asman, Giuliani’s great friend. 

Claire: Hold on a second. I’ll find it for you. It’s Moshe Asman, yes. 

Vlad: It must be Moshe Asman. He’s a star. 

Claire: Do you know him? 

Vlad: I know all the rabbis. Yes, I know Moshe. I know Rabbi Asman, yes. Rabbi Asman is a real fighter. Moshe Asman, yeah. Rabbi Osman became a star in Ukrainian social media for his, like very over the top—

[Sound of singing rabbi ... ]

Claire: It’s great isn’t it? 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s funny because all the chief rabbis of Ukraine were either born in St. Petersburg or served in the Israeli Defense Forces. It’s all very funny. He’s become a media celebrity all over Ukraine for his over-the-top patriotism. Literally like a shotgun in one hand and a Torah in the other one. No Pasaran! They will not kill us! They will not take us to the nether regions! They will not pass!

Claire: Yeah, and God bless him. It’s so astonishing that Putin has managed to convince the number of Americans he’s convinced that he’s fighting Nazis. 

Vlad: Yeah, what’s astonishing about that? 

Claire: What’s astonishing is how effective the propaganda is. And how weak we’ve been in the face of it.

Vlad: Well take a step forward. You literally have a kind of, a new version of fascism. It’s very complicated. I’m not one of these people that refers to the ruzzists, the fascists, to Russian fascism. It is a postmodern regime with a new version of fascism. It’s not a complete Hitlerite-style regime in terms of political economy of the country. It doesn’t have total control, the regime, in the way that Hitler did. It’s not totally— 

Claire: I’m not fond of using the word fascism to describe these—

Vlad: —I’m not either. It’s fascism-light, or whatever. 

Claire: Fascism is a particular movement, in a particular period of time, that only made sense as a contraposition to Bolshevism. 

Vlad: That’s right.  There’s no more Bolshevism. And this regime does not have a—

Claire: —It doesn’t have a fascist theory.

Vlad: It doesn’t have a mystical, essentialist, vitalist component to it. Doesn’t have a theory. It’s a mishmash.  

Claire: It’s a tyranny. We have a good, old-fashioned word for that.

Vlad: It is a tyranny. Both forward-looking and backward-looking at the same time.  It's very interesting.  The reason I’m saying this: I don’t like the misusage of the word fascism. I don’t like it in America. I don’t like it in Eastern Europe. But it is kind of fascism. We do have a kind of fashy country, a dictatorial regime which is committing basically genocide against its neighbor in order to denazify a country run by Jews, basically. Yeah, I mean Ukraine, yeah. 

Claire: But did you see—was it yesterday? 

Vlad: I mean, I say, run by Jews, in a funny way. But like the president, his chief of staff, and the defense minister upon the invasion were Jews. And when he got rid of the Jewish defense minister, he put in a Crimean Tatar Muslim defense minister. That’s not a Nazi regime, obviously. And you do have a kind of Nazi regime, a light-fashy regime trying to denazify aa country led by a secular Ukrainian Jew. 

Claire: It’s so distressing that Putin’s—that Russian propaganda has been as successful as it has been.e—

Vlad: That's how propaganda works. It’s successful. No? 

Claire: You would think that—when you have a climate of freedom of expression, the truth is supposed to rise up and defeat the lies. But it doesn’t seem to be. Rand Paul, yesterday or the day before, was standing up and going on about how Ukraine was corrupt—and, I mean, it is corrupt, but he was suggesting that Ukraine’s corruption and its repression of Christians and its—

Vlad: Well, he’s an opportunist. I mean, he and the people who make those arguments are opportunists. 

Claire: Well, he’s an opportunist along very particular lines. He just echoes Moscow’s line. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right. 

Claire: Cathy Young replied that this was objectionable in some way. I don’t remember the exact words. And the number of people who jumped in to echo what Rand Paul had said—very certain of it—they’re just certain that Ukraine is full of Nazis, profoundly—no better than Russia, certainly. No different from Russia. This is just some sort of conflict between one authoritarian thug and another. How can so many Americans believe something that is so abjectly stupid? 

Vlad: Because the legacy media has collapsed. 

Claire: No, the legacy media is not promoting this. 

Vlad: Well, look, you really want to get into media? No, the legacy media has collapsed. Because, after a couple of years of Russiagate, another stupidity, and the general collapse of the standards of the legacy media, no one trusts the legacy media. I mean, the media has only like 25 or 28 percent of American people who say that they respect it or trust it. It’s the least trusted institution in American life. So people have retreated into their own little epistemic bubbles, and Ukraine has become a heuristic for other sorts of culture war. And it’s cost-free. Everything that you, as a Republican or as a Conservative, might attack within America, there are costs and benefits within internal American culture war stuff. Ukraine is far away, most people have never been there. It’s cost-free, you can just bloviate about it and no one cares, right? 

Claire: We’re also in the age of instant communications on social media. You would think that people who are in doubt about this would just speak to a Ukrainian. 

Vlad: They’re not in doubt, they just don’t care, Claire. It’s different. 

Claire: You don’t sound as angry about this as you should be. 

Vlad: It’s funny that the Ukrainian nationalist is explaining to you why … the Ukrainian patriot is explaining to you why he’s not … I think some of those people are deceived—

Claire: The military aid is being held up, and might in fact stop completely if Trump is elected, because of this crap. 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, it doesn’t make me happy. I mean, I’m fighting against it. But, like, I understand the deep roots of it and the deep roots of it are partly the failure of American elites to tend to their own garden and keep up the credibility of their own institutions. And, you know, Ukrainians become a political football, especially with the Trumpets base. 

Claire: I don’t buy that this is the elite’s fault. It is the moral responsibility of people who refuse to inform themselves and get their news from enemy propaganda. 

Vlad: People are idiots. People are idiots. I don’t believe that the public has more responsibility or like even—

Claire: You mean they’re like dumb oxen? 

Vlad: Yeah, I’m kind of a misanthrope. I’m an Eastern European misanthrope. I don’t—I believe that, you know, like, the people who are spreading the propaganda, who should know better—everyone’s—the people who don’t understand Russia-gate or Ukraine-gate—those things are hard to understand. You have to have a lot of insider information and a good sense. And people have a lot to do. They have kids, they have busy lives. They rely on experts like me to explain things to them. And some of those experts failed, and some of those experts were in the media that spread Russia-gate. 

Claire: One thing that I was thinking reading this thought is, “It’s just going to go completely over the heads of the people who most need to read it. It’s just—it’s literate. It’s … they’re not going to read a book like this. 

Vlad: Look, if I sell 10,000 copies of an academic book about important things, about choosing Ukrainians, I’ll be happy. I didn’t get into this business—I would have gone into banking, like my father demanded, if I wanted popular success, you know? 

Claire: Yeah, but you just said, “It’s for me to explain these things to them.” So how are you going to explain it? 

Vlad: You found the contradiction, yes. The contradiction is internal. I believe the provenance of God and Claire Berlinski will get us through the long dark night.

Claire: I wish we had a president who was capable of using the bully pulpit to explain this. 

Vlad: Well, the president is playing a double game because he doesn’t want the Ukrainians to win. That’s the thing. He doesn’t care. I mean, he... I know so much. I know so much. 

Claire: Tell me what you know. 

Vlad: Some of it’s off the record. 

Claire Well, can you give, like, hints? 

Vlad: So, in a particular way, the failure of the Biden administration is the failure of Biden himself. Because he was the Obama Administration’s point man in Ukraine, in 2014 to 2016, until the Trump Administration came in. And it was his portfolio. Obama gave it to him. And since the Obama Administration did not want the Ukrainians to fight back. They said, “There’s no possible world in which we care about Ukraine more than the Russians do”—they kind of always, from the very beginning, tied the hands of the Ukrainians and how they could respond. So the Ukrainians muddled through and the Russians didn’t use enough force because they weren’t willing to go all-in. 

I mean, in order to achieve his policy objectives, Putin really should have invaded in this way in 2014. He would have taken the country. There was no army. He should have done that nine years ago, eight years ago, seven years ago. It’s too late. The Ukrainians had the chance to build state capacity and a very serious military apparatus, as people have noticed. Not nearly as serious as the Russian one, but, you know, serious enough to give a good fight. 

Claire: Well, without a navy, they’ve taken out the Black Sea Fleet! 

Vlad: They had a navy in 2014. Some of it defected and some of it was blown up by the Russians, sunk by the Russians. They don’t have a navy now, they did in 2014. 

The Biden Administration is in some ways doing a good job, in other ways it did not prepare the Ukrainians for the war, and it’s prolonged this war by a lot, by slow-rolling it. So I’m not one of these guys who thinks Biden’s doing good. I mean, I’ll defend him to Republican conservatives because—

Claire: We agree about this, but you suggested that you had some insight into Biden’s thinking. What happened to the Biden who was so outraged by what he saw in Ukraine that he said, in Poland, “This man cannot remain in power,” and his aides had to walk it back?

Vlad: Yeah, that was a great moment. I was there. I was there when he said it. Yeah, I wish that we still had that guy now. But the National Security Council around him is just too timid, and they are too afraid of the Russians and escalation, nuclear war, escalation in the Black Sea. You know, they’re just not ready to go full in. So they’ve made certain decisions that they want to slow roll this. They don’t want the Russians to win, but neither do they want them to lose too badly. 

Claire: That’s insane. It’s insane. It’s just the wrong posture, strategically. And what drives me crazy is that there’s no alternative. This is where a normal Republican Party should be making this criticism, and should be trustworthy with national security, and instead they’re a complete catastrophe and a disaster. 

Vlad: Yeah. 

Claire: I mean, I’m not saying that the fear of nuclear war is an insane fear. Of course I think it’s a very real thing to be afraid of. But the idea—you know, you either trust in deterrence or you don’t. I mean, going halfway is the worst strategy. Well, not the worst strategy. It’s the second-worst strategy. And I just don’t see that … you know, I think Trump will withdraw from NATO in his first day in power if he’s reelected. And I just don’t see Americans having a conversation about how serious this situation is and what this would mean for the security of the entire world. 

Vlad: Yeah. 

Claire: I don’t know what to do beyond what I say and what I do to get people to take it seriously. 

Vlad: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, will people read my book? Will it change any minds? If I change the minds of fifty people, if there are fifty good men? Should we level the city? I don’t know. Do you think fifty people will read my book and change their minds? Fifty, probably. Five hundred, yes. Five thousand, possibly. 

Claire: The book certainly changed my views and explained a lot to me. 

Vlad: Well, good, so okay, so let’s keep going, right? Do you believe in the power of a text? Do you believe in the power of a text, Claire? 

Claire: Absolutely, I do. 

Vlad: Very Jewish of you. 

Claire: Tell people about Andrey Sheptytsky.

Vlad: Andrey Sheptytsky was this very heroic and remarkable man. He was a giant, a gentle, beautiful giant. He was like a six-foot-nine Polish-Ukrainian aristocrat. He was the head of a Greco-Catholic Church during the war and he saved a lot of Jews. And he was pivotal for Jewish-Ukrainian relations. His brother Clement did a lot, also. 

Because of politics he was never named Righteous Amongst the Nations by Yad Vashem, which is of course a great oversight. It seems they very deliberately decided no not righteous enough. 

Claire: Its seems like more than an oversight. It seems they deliberately decided, “No, not righteous enough.”

Vlad: There’s a lot of politics there. I mean, the book gets into the politics. I wholeheartedly agree with the campaign to make them righteous amongst the nations. This is a good thing and we should do it and that would be one way of paying back debts. And there are a lot of very important and smart and influential people who work on that campaign. and I'd like to count myself amongst those people. But, you know, a lot of the people who ran Yad Vashem were Soviet Jews from the Russian side. The previous gentleman—

Claire: —Oh, Vlad. Page 80. You’ve got a big whopper here. “If Zelensky actually does become president of Ukraine?” 

Vlad: Well, I mean, this is a reprint. Right. In what context did I say this? Yeah, I didn’t notice that. 

Claire: You’re talking about Poroshenko and you say he’s not the only candidate playing the Jewish card. “Zelensky, the current frontrunner, is a 41-year-old Jewish comedian and actor whose primary suitability for the job is his experience having played a schoolteacher.”

Vlad: Well, I mean, it says at the end of the book—at the end of that essay—it was reprinted from 2018. I should put that at the front. 

Claire: Yeah, you should put it in the front. You should put it in the front. 

Vlad: Page 81, you say? My book is being edited in real time. Thank you so much, Claire.

Claire: You’re so welcome. You’re so welcome. One other thing before you go, you made an observation which I think is really important, which I'd never thought about, saying that the Holodomor should be understood as a Jewish catastrophe as well as Ukrainian, and I had never thought about that. I had never thought that that’s our history too. 

Vlad: So the Holodomor, of course, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews who were Ukrainians also. They were also in the countryside. You know, if you can’t get bread, you can’t get bread, doesn’t matter which religion or what color your eyes are. There were hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews who starved to death during the Holodomor because of the fact that they were Ukrainian peasants, rather than Jews, first and foremost. 

Claire: I wonder why that’s not more a part of Jewish memory. Is it because what happened subsequently just blotted out all other memory or is it because no one survived it to tell the story to their kids? 

Vlad: No, a lot of people survived it. The Jews who were in the countryside starved. The people who were in the cities didn’t have—I mean, the people went from the countryside went into the cities looking for food and they were more likely to survive in the cities. It’s in the countryside that people starved to death, right? Although, I mean, some people died in the cities also. But it did purge the countryside of the people who were living there. And so the Jews in the countryside were the ones that starved along with their Ukrainian farmer—peasant, whatever—neighbors. And a lot of it—

Claire: By definition, if you starve, you do not emigrate, you do not pass the memory of this down to your kids and your grandkids. 

Vlad: Yeah, but a lot of people who starved just ran away to the nearest city and found food there. Not everyone who’s starving died, some people survived. I mean, like millions of people died during the starvation, It was terrible. It was a Ukrainian catastrophe, but starvation does not target people based on religion or culture.

Claire: How many Jews perished in the Holodomor?

Vlad: I imagine it’s 100,000? It’s a question I’ve never seen interrogated. But you’ve got to remember that the large-scale starvation and the entire population of Ukraine watching people eating their children, eating their dog, dying in is streets with bloated bellies—the trauma of that, and the trauma of the communists going around killing peasants and taking away their land, it led to the preamble of what happens six years later. You have to understand that the Holodomor led to the trauma that partly allows the Holocaust to take place. I’m not saying that is the cause, clearly not, I’m not some sort of revisionist—

Claire: It led to devaluation of life and the toleration of obscenity 

Vlad: Well, I mean, like, it’s just—you’re living in a psychotic place. You’re living in a crazy place where people are dying, in a place where communists are running out of guns, where you just survived a brutal war and civil war ten years ago, nineteen years ago, your parents survived a brutal war. And then ten years ago, seven years ago, six-and-a-half years ago, people were starving to death. And now there’s an occupation and another war, and people are dying again—well, it contributes to an atmosphere of death. Of devastation, of destruction, of trauma. You know, it’s a cascade effect, that’s what I’m saying. 

I’m no way—please do not, anyone, call and accuse me of saying that the Holodomor led to the Holocaust in any way. What I’m saying, I think, and I’m trying to say it very precisely to not cause any historiological or revisionist issues, is that the suffering of the Holodomor created the atmosphere of trauma and, you know, being able to ignore trauma as a survival mechanism, that led to the capacity of the Nazis to kill people. Obviously, not the only reason. Clearly, it’s a multi-vector, multi-origin story, but it’s an underplayed aspect of a story that you don’t hear spoken about very often, which it should be. 

Claire: And as you point out later in the book, when you’re looking at contemporary Eastern Europe, especially when you’re looking at the emergence of far-right groups across the region, it has roots in the absence of a proper mourning of what has transpired in the past century. 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, like the OUN. Even the OUN was a response to the loss of democratic self-governance. The Polish and the Ukrainians in the borderlands, Poland-Ukraine, started killing each other, whereas they lived harmoniously, more or less, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and they had devolved educational rights and cultural linguistic rights. Yeah? So a lot of the Polish-nationalist stuff and Ukrainian-nationalist stuff—with the Jews in between, of course, always, without guns—was an outcome of, you know, the destruction of democratic norms. I’m not saying the Austro-Hungarian empire was the most democratic place. It was sometimes very liberal. Especially in the outposts, like in Chernowitz, where my family was from, where Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles live together in some sort of productive, harmonious way until World War I, until the Bolshevik War, until the Communists, then the Nazis, the Polish Partition, all this. The Jews fall victims to various very nasty, very nasty things that happened because of—not them. I think that’s one way of putting it. Like the pogroms, the 1905 pogroms were peasant pogroms, but they were also—this was an effusion of unhappiness with the Tsarist state, right? These are the urban riots that the Tsarist regime was so petrified of. They didn’t want pogroms against the Jews. It was an effusion of the same kind of peasant rioting that would bring down the regime. Right? So UPA and the Volhynia massacres, this is an outcome of, you know, basic tribal warfare, right? I mean, I’m not apologizing for any of this. I’m trying to—

Claire: No, I’ll just read right from the book. You write, 

Arguments over who has suffered the most ultimately debase everyone involved. The extension of mutual empathy need not exclude anyone. The Jewish diaspora in Israel can do more to acknowledge the local particular history without undermining the unique horror of the Holocaust, just as Eastern Europeans need to be responsible and sensitive to historical realities as they craft post-Soviet national identities. But all that will require overcoming contemporary geopolitical realities on top of the already heavy burden of history. 

This is the thing. This war. The blood had barely dried when this war broke out. No one is getting any chance to come to terms in any way with any of these horrors. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right. That’s absolutely right. Yeah. 

Claire: All right. On that note, let’s draw this to a close because—

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much, Claire. I’m very grateful. There’s a lot to say. 

Claire: There is. 

Vlad: This book is a culmination of ten years of my work. I’m trying to—you know, having returned to the land of my ancestors, I’m a repatriate, of course. I’m a repat. This is where my ancestors are from. This is where my wife’s from. This is where my people are from. I have a deep identification with the Ukrainians and the Jews. These are my people. I’ve been criticized, by some Jews, for being too soft, but I don’t think so. 

I’m very empathetic to the understanding of the fact that what happened during World War II took place without the Ukrainians having their own states, you know, like the Germans had a German state, what they did was under the auspices of a German state. Neither the Poles nor the Ukrainians can be held to the same level of responsibility as can the French or the German populations who are governed by Frenchmen and Germans, right? Whatever happened during World War II, it happened under the auspices of occupation, and so the Ukrainian political nation, just like the Polish political nation, I—as a Jew—do not feel has the same level of responsibility as—

Claire: When you compare levels of responsibility with Hitler, it doesn’t suggest that there’s—there’s plenty of evil to go before you’re at Hitler's level of responsibility. 

Vlad: Yeah, but they did have their own state, is the point. And I’m very empathetic to that argument. Obviously, you couldn’t have those arguments, those historical arguments, before 2014. And the Ukrainian state went very far in having a very long-sided conversation, dialogue, within the country about all this, right? Not as much as it could have and also at the same time they were celebrating people like the Canadian gentleman, the Waffen-SS guy who stood up for the parliament. 

Claire: That was a screw-up. 

Vlad: That was a screw-up. That was a terrible, terrible screw-up. 

Claire: What does it say about Canada that no one present thought, “If he was fighting the Soviets, that means he was not a good guy?”

Vlad: Yeah, it’s kind of weird that they didn’t—that they don’t know the history. I I don’t know Canadians, but it’s obvious to me if he was fighting the Soviets he was on the bad side of things. I mean, obviously, a lot of Ukrainians were fighting the Soviets because they wanted their own country. They were fighting—

Claire: You know, our listeners might not know what we’re talking about 

Vlad: Claire, explain please. 

Claire: I don't remember his name, but when Zelensky was in Canada, they honored someone who was portrayed as a Ukrainian war hero, and—

Vlad: This gentleman’s name was Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought in the Waffen-SS. He was a veteran of the Waffen-SS and it was like the Galicia 1 division. The division was put together after a lot of the Holocaust, and historians say that the Galicia 1 Division didn’t actually, as a unit, do anything against the Jews. Obviously, a lot of the auxiliary policemen and soldiers and volunteers who joined up did kill Jews and did kill Poles. I mean, it’s an entire mess. 

Claire: Well the main thing is that you don’t honor a member of the Waffen-SS in the Canadian Parliament. But no one figured out that that’s what he was, because they just didn’t put two and two together. 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s like, you know, how do you not understand that a Canadian who fought against the Russians was fighting in the woods against the partisans, you know? 

Claire: It’s the kind of historic illiteracy that—do you remember when Reagan went to Bitburg? 

Vlad: I don’t because—

Claire: —right. For some reason, he was scheduled to go and lay a wreath at Bitburg. Where all these Waffen SS were buried. And there was a huge controversy about it when people realized this is not a good place for the American president to be going. But there was also this real worry that if he pulled out at the last minute, it would be very offensive. And no one was quite sure what protocol demanded. 

My grandfather had the solution to the problem. He was very proud of it. He said he should go. He should put down the wreath. Then he should unzip his trousers and piss on the grave. 

Vlad: That’s a … that’s a position. 

Claire : All right, I’m going to let you go. 

Vlad: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this great talk. It was really, really nice to talk to you about it. 

Claire: Everyone go out and buy this book. 

Vlad: It’s trending on Amazon.com. 

I’ve taken the paywall off this post to encourage you to share it widely. Do you have friends who think the Ukrainians are Nazis? Try sending this to them. What can it hurt?

 

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Vladislav Davidzon has for almost a decade been one of the most acute observers of the Ukrainian–Jewish relationship and of the place of Ukrainian Jewry within a developing political nation. His stylish reportage has been invaluable for understanding the dynamics of the Jewish Ukraine in a historical moment. This volume will surely enter the canon as an important document for anyone who wishes to understand this moment.—Wolf Moskovich

A masterful chronicler of the real odyssey of the Ukrainian Jew amidst revolutionary times!—Simon Sebag Montefiore

Claire: Hi! This is Claire Berlinski with the Cosmopolicast. We have Vladislav Davidzon back again to discuss his new book, which I just read, and Vlad—I loved it. I loved it. 

Vlad: Oh, wonderful! Thank you. 

Claire: I have to say, I was sort of wondering, “Am I really going to enjoy reading this?” Yesterday evening, when I thought I was kind of under pressure to read it quickly and just wasn’t sure I was in the mood for a book about Jews and Ukraine and Ukraine and Jews—I couldn’t put it down. I loved it. It’s so … well, let me back up a little bit. Why don’t you introduce your book, and I’ll add a few comments after you’ve told people what it’s about?

Vlad: Hi, Claire. Thank you so much for having me on again. So. To my neighbor Claire and friend—we live close to each other in Paris, in an undisclosed neighborhood, although I’m sure every intelligence agency that wants to know where it is that we live already has our locations. 

We are celebrating the publication of my second book. It’s called  The Birth of a Political Nation. It’s about Jews and Ukrainians. It’s a selection of my best and most interesting pieces on this perennial theme between 2013 and 2023. So, ten years of my best pieces. I selected 20, 22 of my most interesting articles—the ones I think are most useful—and added new stuff, padded them out, and created a narrative. 

Claire: Yeah, it all fits together. It fits together as a book. 

Vlad: Absolutely, right? You can tell that it does, right? That’s the point.

Claire: I mean, it’s really linked—anyone who’s in any way interested in modern Ukraine, and who, because of the war, has heard a great deal about Ukraine but doesn’t really know what this country is like—this book will—well, I feel like I’ve been there now. 

Vlad: No writer could get higher praise. 

Claire: Oh, well, they could, actually. I mean the introduction from Bernard-Henri Lévy is pretty good. 

Vlad: I love it. I rather love it, but some people might think I’m a bit of a character having read it.

Claire: I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You were telling people about the book. 

Vlad: So the book, yes, the book is a collection of my thoughts. It is about …

It is about politics. 

It is about memory politics. 

It is about trauma. 

It is about minority rights. 

It is about politics with a big P and politics with a small p. 

It is about history. 

It is about Russian propaganda. 

It is about Putin’s obsessiveness. 

It is about the key to understanding this conflict, which is [that there are] two different conceptions of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Slavic state, post-Soviet. 

On the Russian side, you have a markedly totalitarian, authoritarian, centralized autarky that has difference—in terms of particularity—subsumed to an autarkic idea of the state.

On the other side, you have a liberal, democratic, very messy conception of a modern polity, in the middle of Europe, one of, actually the most liberal, in many ways, and one of the most multi-ethnic, certainly in the terraformed-after-Hitler lands of the bloodlands in Eastern Europe, whatever you want to call it, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, right? 

So you have two different conceptions of how to run a Slavic, post-Soviet state with a lot of different kinds of people living in it. That’s the same with Russia.  Russia is also a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, multi-racial, multicultural, multi-religious state. 

And you have two different ideas of how to run it. And you have two different generations of people. One, a Soviet regime—the Putin regime in its sixties. And then you have the liberal, democratic Zelensky political regime, a liberal regime, which is in its forties. 

So you have two different ideas and two different generations fighting over what the future of an Eastern European post-Soviet state will be. And the Jews, as people, as an idea, as an apparition, as a figure of speech, and a figure of image—of literature and history and propaganda—are in the middle of this. So you have, you know, even if you’re not interested in Jews, it’s a very interesting book about memory politics. 

Claire: Absolutely. The central thesis of the book is that if you understand the story of Ukrainian Jewry over the last decade since the Maidan Revolution, you understand the development of Ukraine as a modern nation-state. And as I was reading it, I thought—

Vlad: —Absolutely. Well said. Thank you. I wish—can I actually have that?  I'm sending the last proofs in to the editor today. I can actually get that on the back cover. Would you like that? 

Claire: Yes, absolutely. Um—you’re sending the last proofs? Because I found some typos. I wasn’t going to mention them to you. 

Vlad: Would you please send them now? 

Claire: I didn’t realize. I thought it was too late. Yeah, I’ll send you a complete—

Vlad: —Please send me the typos immediately, Claire. Immediately. 

Claire: —I didn’t realize that it wasn’t too late, so I just wasn’t going to tell you. 

Vlad: You’re working with a pre-final edit PDF. We’re sending the last edit to—

Claire: But the draft I have is the one you’re working from?

Vlad: The draft you have is—yeah, indeed, it is the one that you’re working on. I mean, I copyedited it, my friends copyedited it. I mean, the people on the podcast don’t care about this.

Claire: —If you order this book today, how long will it take to get to you? 

Vlad: The book will be out in a month. I imagine people will get it in six weeks, five or six weeks.

Claire: But they can pre-order it now. 

Vlad: Totally, they should pre-order it right now. 

Claire: They really should pre-order it. I just wanted to say something about that. It is not an inexpensive book. It’s US$42. 

Vlad: Speaking of which, right before this, since we’re right in the final things, we are lowering the price. 

Claire: Really? 

Vlad: I think US$31 or US$30, because the people at the Columbia University Press decided that I’m just that cool, that I can sell—

Claire: And I think a book like this—the price is going to be very elastic. A lot more people will buy it if—

Vlad: Yeah, I mean that’s why we’re lowering the price. …. Come, step right up, step right up. We’re lowering the price. One time only. Come to Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. Home of the Dodgers. Home of Vladislav Davidzon. Home of Donald Trump and Frum Trump. Come, step right up, step right up—

Claire: Get your Jews, get your Ukrainians—

Vlad: Get your Jews, get your Jews, get your hot dogs—

Claire: I was just saying, for me, US$30 is still an expensive book. For me, that’s not an impulse purchase. An impulse purchase, for me, is five dollars. That’s how much I think a book should cost. But I’m aware that I’m—that this is completely out of step with with modern book publishing. Nonetheless, I’m going to tell people—

Vlad: —You could steal books, also, Claire. There are people who believe that— 

Claire: —Yeah, that’s grotesque. You should buy it because it’s a beautiful book, first. Because it’s got lots Vlad’s artwork in it, and it’s really worth it. I mean, most people will need to be convinced, a little bit. But I really think it’s worth US$30 to read this book. It’s given me a better insight into Ukrainian culture than any other book I’ve read. And I think that’s important, because people outside of Ukraine are connecting to Ukraine as a culture war totem, or an abstract idea. But this brought the people alive, and it brought the culture alive. And perhaps now I think of it, a little bit too much, like Brooklyn. But it really brought a rich, vibrant culture to life. 

And to the extent that you can measure the health, the moral health of a society by its treatment of Jews—

Vlad: —and minorities in general. It’s a heuristic for treatment of minorities. Jews are of course the ultimate minority. 

Claire: I think Jews are a really good measure because Jews are always the ones who are persecuted first. Right? 

Vlad: So, we’re noticeable. 

Claire: Yeah.

Vlad: We’re complicated. And we’re economically productive. 

Claire: It’s not a huge community of Jews—a quarter of a million, right? 

Vlad: Look, here’s the thing, no one really knows the numbers. I mean, some people say as much as a million if you count a lot of people who don’t know that they’re Jewish, who find out that they’re Jewish late in life.  There are a lot of people who are halfsies, who are quarters. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine—much less now because of the war, because the population of Ukraine has been emptied out by refugee flows. There are a lot of Jews, now, from Ukraine in Brooklyn and Florida and Israel and Russia, if they were on the other side of the divide—if they were on the other side of the border. It’s like three million Ukrainian refugees into Russia because they were on the other side of the country, that’s where you could fly to. A lot of them in Poland, because there are millions of Ukrainians in Poland and Ukrainian Jews are Ukrainians, after all. 

Claire: And the way you describe it, it’s a big, boisterous community. It’s a very Jewish Jewish community with lots of—you know, no one’s hiding it.  No one’s ashamed of it. 

Vlad: Some people are. And some people for them, it’s not important, including some people who’ve been prime minister recently. No names. The current president, of course, is a Jew and he doesn’t hide it.  He’s very elegantly deployed it during the war for the greater good. 

And there are a lot of Jews. Unlike Poland. unlike Hungary. Unlike other Eastern and Central European states where the Nazis were more successful in terraforming the landscape. There are a lot of Jews in Ukraine, and it’s a Jewish country, with a large Jewish diaspora still, just like Russia. 

Claire: What’s remarkable is that this has occurred in a country that is, for most Jews, synonymous with anti-Semitism. 

Vlad: Which is something that I’d really like to change, by the way. 

Claire: Well, you can’t change the history. But certainly it sounds as if Ukraine has changed—

Vlad: —I would like, to be very precise, for Ukraine to stop being synonymous with Jew-hatred. That’s something that I’m working on. That’s something that I think of as my mandate. That’s something that is part of my life’s work.  I’m not the only one who cares about this, but it’s important to me. 

Claire: It’s important. It is important. Gosh, just the other day, I think, we had a reader cancel a subscription because he had lost relatives in Ukraine and found the idea of supporting Ukraine, militarily, intolerable. 

Vlad: Please give me his email and phone number. I will personally email him and call him and have a nice conversation with him. He could be Polish. If he’s a Jewish gentleman, I would like to have a personal conversation with him. I will hunt down and have a personal, intimate conversation with every single Jew in the Ashkenazi, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, Ukrainian, French-speaking world and explain to them why this is important, one by one. 

Claire: All right. Well, let’s talk about the book, because there’s lots of points here that I really wanted to talk about with you. First of all, this introduction by BHL [Bernard Henri-Lévy]—it’s just beautiful. He really got you. 

Vlad: He likes me. 

Claire: He does, he loves you. 

BHL is a French intellectual, a very well-known French intellectual who, well—perhaps this will be demoralizing for you to hear, but when he shows up at a conflict, you know someone’s about to be genocided. He’s usually on the [morally] right side of things. 

Vlad: He’s great. 

Claire: He’s absolutely great in many ways. 

Vlad: I love him. 

Claire: Except when it comes to cats. 

Vlad: Look, it’s okay. Maybe he has an allergy. It’s okay. 

Claire: I realized that to read BHL and appreciate him, you have to read him out loud.  If you just read him on the page, to the Anglophone ear, he’s unbearably pretentious. But I discovered—because I was reading a book I was supposed to review out loud—that he sounds much better if you read him out loud. 

Vlad: It actually is the way it’s meant to be read. Because he’s an orator. He’s an orator and an oracular writer. 

Claire: Exactly! Exactly!

Vlad: He’s telling a story in an eighteenth-, nineteenth-century oracular oratory tradition. And it just doesn’t translate perfectly from French, because of the cadences—it just doesn’t translate perfectly from French. And if a lot more people ever read him in French, or read the better parts of his of his oeuvre—which are more poetic parts, less political parts—out loud, they would understand that this is a kind of oracular syncretic storyteller, who’s singing a beautiful song. 

Claire: Can I read a little bit of the introduction? 

Vlad: Please do.

Claire: It’s just a wonderful introduction. He says, “Vlad came into my life upon my return from Ukraine in 2014.” I’m going to skip a little bit. “... From Paris to Kyiv, from Tangiers to the south of France and New York, I have gotten to know this start-up intellectual, as mischievous as a child and fascinated by rakes, with a devilish laugh and a taunting gaze, arrogant and clever, impulsive but never credulous, ambitious but indecisive, erudite and poetic—” I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever received a love letter nicer than that. 

Vlad: I mean, any woman who got a love letter like that has to go to bed with a man who sent it to her. 

Claire: “ … Was he a poet or a dilettante, a devil or a dandy? … Was he American or European? Uzbek, Russian, or Ukrainian? Was he bragging when he declared that on the day Russia invaded Ukraine (for he was one of the few people I know who, like me, never doubted that the day would come) he would tear up his Russian passport in front of Putin’s embassy in Paris?”—Well, we know you weren’t bragging because we went together to do that. 

Vlad: Thank you yet again, Claire. 

Claire: [reading]—“Solid as a rock, brave, funny … ”

Vlad: I’ll take it, I’ll take it!

Claire: Yeah, I want to keep reading from it because it’s just so lovely. Oh! “Here was straight Oscar Wilde—the straight Oscar Wilde—converted overnight into the most curious, intrepid, and acute of war reporters without ever giving up the stylish pouch he wore with the bullet-proof vest, without forgoing his matching jacket and socks, and, above all, without sacrificing anything of his humor and composure.”

He goes on—I don’t want to spend the whole time on this—but he goes on to say that for certain people, a certain historic event brings together all of their talents and all of their insights and—um, how does he put it exactly? Where does he say it? ….

—A historical event that everything within you sensed approaching, an event that once it occurs pulls together the scattered thoughts, brings back dreams from childhood, awakens unused strengths, imparts an aspiration to greatness that prior circumstances had not allowed to emerge. In short, an event that mobilizes and crystallizes the most secret and noble part of the soul.

And he says: The war in Ukraine is your war. 

Vlad: And by the way, it’s totally correct, by the way.  I went full Lord Byron. I mean, I didn’t even know how crazy and how intense and how amazingly insane I was, and how deeply Slavic I was, and all the ways that my grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought during the wars. Yeah, the war. You really discover who you are at war. I had no idea how focused and intense and just like—I felt no fear. I just, you know, I just moved with total brazenness until I burned out after about six months. But of course, everyone does. That’s why we rotate people out.

Claire: But you just came back from Ukraine. 

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah. 

Claire: And I think you should tell our listeners about that. 

Vlad: Well, you know—I just came back from Odessa and Uman. I was there for Uman. 

Claire: Yeah, tell them about Uman.

Vlad: Oh my God, I’m writing an article now about my dear friend Luzer Tversky, who played the Baal Shem Tov, he’s an American actor in a film called Dovbush and we went to Oman for Rosh Hashanah, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, in order to find his long lost sons. He got divorced at the age of 21. He lost custody of the boys and he hadn’t seen them until his late thirties. He wanted to find the 17-year-old son and tell him that he had his blessing before his wedding day. 

Claire: Tell our listeners about Uman. I mean, you’ve got a chapter here describing it. You describe it as the Burning Man of Jews. 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Burning Man of Jews is about right. Yeah, it’s just an insane place to be. It’s full of searchers and very religious, very frum people, but also just a lot of hippies—I mean, someone asked me to translate for the cops. She was this large-bosomed Persian-American girl, with an Israeli passport, who’  was just a hippie or a weirdo of some sort. And I translated for her for the police, because she was arguing with a German camera guy. And in exchange for my help she said, you know, “I have an NGO called ‘Weed the Homeless,’ and in exchange for your help, I’d like to give you this brick of hashish.”

There’s a lot really drugged up people. There’s a lot of people who are high on narcotics.

Claire: Really?

Vlad: Oh yeah.

Claire: So it really is like Burning Man.

Vlad: Oh yeah, yeah. There are a lot of people high on their own supply, which is fantasia and mysticism, and on the atmosphere, but there are a lot of people who are running around are just really high on drugs.

Claire: That kind of surprises me.

Vlad: Why?

Claire: I don’t know. Maybe it shouldn’t. Yeah, it shouldn’t.

Vlad: It’s mysticism. There are a lot of secular Israelis, a lot of Israeli guys, Sephardi guys come, tough guys who like a good party.  They’re fairly secular, very traditional. It’s really interesting how this Ashkenazi mysticism, this Hasidic mysticism became kind of an Arab-Jewish-Sephardi thing. 

Claire: For those of our listeners who might not know who Nachman was, or why all these people are making this pilgrimage, why don’t you just briefly explain what this is? 

Vlad: So the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was a mystic from the Carpathian Mountains in the eighteenth century, early eighteenth century, about 300 years ago, 350 years ago, something like that, maybe 320, and he had a great-grandson, one of the many expositors of his values. The mystical expositor of his values was the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who codified a very happy version of mystical Judaism, where you worship God not by studying and textual criticism, studying the Torah, but instead dancing and drinking and fornicating and having fun and being close to God through your mysticism. So it was a very peasant form of mysticism. 

Claire: Did Jews not dance before that? Because I thought dancing was always part of being a Jew. 

Vlad: I think it was always a part of being a Jew, but not like these guys did it. These guys just really made dancing into a theology. I mean, they stripped the theology and they kept the dancing. 

Claire: Yeah, so it’s a much more intense, personal, mystical kind of Judaism. 

Vlad: Correct. 

Claire: And this is kind of the world from which Isaac Bashevis Singer comes, isn’t it? 

Vlad: Sure, yeah, and a lot of other people. This is a very mountain Jew, Eastern European phenomenon, which reached its hypothesis in the nineteenth century and then of course was destroyed by Hitler. They were very badly prepared for Hitler. They were wearing black coats, they didn’t have an education, they didn’t know languages outside of Hebrew and Yiddish. Some of them knew Russian and Ukrainian. But the Hasidim were the most open toward—I mean, like open target. Not open, but they were the most openly targeted because they were easiest to get. They were wearing black hats and black coats, and they were not very worldly. They were either eradicated or wound up in Israel, or Antwerp, or the UK—or mostly New York City, New York State. 

Claire: Well, some obviously survived in Ukraine. How many actually survived and have been living there continuously? 

Vlad: Well, some of them survived and had to give up their religiosity and become Soviet citizens. They couldn't operate as Hasidism throughout Soviet times.  There were no black hats in Soviet times, obviously. There was an interregnum, about eighty years, where you couldn’t behave like that. And in that same way, when Uman was forbidden as a place of pilgrimage, during Soviet times, very intrepid and very brave dissident types would go there on Rosh Hashanah. It was a place where in the eighties, I think by the late seventies, certainly by the early eighties, a lot of very intrepid travelers would travel. 

Claire: What happens? The Soviet Union collapses, and then do people who have been—

Vlad: It dissolved, Claire. By the way. One of my pet peeves is when people say “collapse.” It dissolved, actually. Relatively painlessly, until now. Unlike Yugoslavia, or the Turkish Empire, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet dissolution was actually relatively bloodless. There were regional wars between Georgia and the Armenians and the Azeris, there were wars in the Caucasus. And there was a war, obviously, between the Chechens and the Russians. But for the most part—other than, clearly, the invasion of Moldova and all that—for the most part, the Russians took fifteen years off before inflicting the pain of the collapse, of losing the Empire, on the rest of us. The invasion of Georgia, the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians—you know, they took fifteen years off in order to deal with their own stuff. Obviously, these are the final earthquakes of the collapse of the Empire. The Empire has been dissolving for thirty years. It didn’t happen overnight. Empires are very big. They live a different lifespan than people do, right?  So I don’t like it when people say “collapsed.” It dissolved. At first peacefully, but it turns out, not so peacefully. We thought—and I say this in the introductory article—that we had avoided the bloodletting of Yugoslavia—and the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish Empires—upon its dissolution into national states. That was not the case. 

Claire: Explain to me, when the Soviet Empire dissolves, were the Jews in Ukraine—had they been practicing this secretly? Or did they return from Israel, or from abroad, to come back to revive this tradition? 

Vlad: Well, so here, so for the most part, they were all secularized. Like, let’s say, 97, 99 percent of them were secularized. Some, obviously, a million and a half, have been killed during the Holocaust. Let’s say another million or so left to Israel and America, including my own family in the eighties and nineties. And then a lot went to Germany. You had a couple of hundred thousand people left, out of a community of several million. Hitler had his solution to the quote-unquote “problem.” Stalin’s solution was to make them good Soviet citizens and destroy their culture. And some of them went to America, from the safety perspective. That was, actually, over the twentieth century, the correct choice. Some of them went to Israel and they became Israelis. That was a Zionist solution. And the ones that stayed had to give up Judaism in order to become Soviet citizens. 

Claire: How did they revive this culture? I assume there were no pilgrimages under the Soviet Union? 

Vlad: Well, I mean, the rabbis and Israeli Mossad guys that I talked to who started doing it started doing it in the late eighties when the system was collapsing.  They started coming in the late eighties. There was a kind of general, let’s say, American—the gold rush for souls, to mix metaphors. In the nineties, there were a lot of people who came, from all religious backgrounds, especially evangelical, to fish for souls in the former Soviet republics. And there was a general religious revival in all fifteen Soviet republics, because religion is part of human nature and part of a normal, ordinary, orderly human society. And people need clerics, and it has a special place in social structure—obviously, you’re not going to get rid of religion. We tried, in the Soviet Union. That experiment failed. And all across the Soviet Union, you had religious revival. Uneven: In some places more than others. In some places, the church or the mosque became captured by the state—let’s say, Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan. Or Russia, for that matter. In some places that process was stalled, because they never went through decommunization: Belarus. In some places it was normal, because people just returned to having a normal country, like the Baltic success stories. In Ukraine, it was a mixed story, because so many people just didn’t come back to religiosity.  Most people in Ukraine are still mostly secular, and most Jews are mostly secular. And when the American missionaries came in the nineties, they mostly did their work not in the West, which was deeply Catholic and Greco-Catholic; they did their work in the south and the east, both in the Christian and the Jewish missionary communities. They worked mostly in the Donbas and in the south. 

Claire: Was the pilgrimage to Uman invented then? Or had that been a regular occurrence before the Soviets? 

Vlad: I think it was a regular occurrence. I don't know about Russian Imperial times. It’s a great question actually. It was something that people did during late Soviet times and during the nineties, it became a big thing. So I’ve been a couple of times. 

Claire: So it’s possible that this historic annual pilgrimage is something—sort of a recent invention? 

Vlad: In its modern version of 35,000 people and, like, a Jewish discotheque of drugs, yes, certainly that’s very modern. 

Claire: So did you feel the religious … did you feel the mysticism? 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah, it’s very, it’s always very intense. I mean, it’s very, very, very intense. It’s like a—it’s like a little, very intense version of Bnei Brak in Brooklyn plopped down—Bnei Brak is where the Orthodox live in Jerusalem—plopped down in the middle of Ukraine. It has a very Israeli atmosphere, I would say, despite the fact there’s a lot of Hasidim and Brooklyn Hasidim. It’s just a very Israeli, kind of harried, atmosphere—like the kebab stands are run by Israelis, andrun in Israeli fashion. The businesses are run Israeli-fashion. It’s very—it’s very deeply Israeli, in that sense. Like you know, a secular-religious version of a syncretic-secular-Jewish culture. 

Claire: Well, it sounds like things are going better in that regard in Ukraine than they are in Israel, if you’ve seen the news. It’s just awful.  Fights broke out on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv over Yom Kippur over the segregation of the sexes. 

Vlad: Yes, I did notice that. I mean, there’s segregation of the sexes in Uman also, but that’s voluntary. Go ahead— 

Claire: —No, go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt. 

Vlad: I went to find my friend’s sons with him. He had not seen his sons in two years. I’m writing an article about this now. It’ll come out in Tablet. 

Claire: You just got back how many days ago? 

Vlad: About three days ago, from Ukraine. 

Claire: I want to talk to you about this great interview that you have with Borislav Bereza. Is that how you pronounce it?

Vlad: Bereza, yeah, yeah. My friend who’s now a member—he lost his parliamentary seat in 2019, he was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament 2014 to 2019. He was, like, a straight-up—he was the spokesman for Right Sector. He was a Jewish guy. He was the spokesman for Right Sector. Right Sector is a nationalist, a very nationalist organization. 

Claire: Well, when people say that the far-right isn’t very powerful in Ukraine, they’ll say things like, “Look, the Right Sector only got this tiny percentage of the vote.”

Vlad: —And their spokesman was an Orthodox Jew. 

Claire: And that’s the part that's mind-blowing. The spokesman is an Orthodox Jew. So these Nazis—I mean, this is the group that makes people say, “Ukraine is full of Nazis”—

Vlad: —I was like, “What about the Nazi stuff?” And he’s like, “Bro.” He’s a tough guy, he served in the Israeli Defense Force, he’s a tough guy. He says, “Bro, what are you talking about? We have ultra right-wing patriots of every race, of every creed, of every color.”

Claire: The interview itself conveys how surreal this is. 

Vlad: Yeah, that was from 2014. I think he’s really playing it up to the crowd. But yes, it’s not unrepresentative of that moment, of his moment and him.  I have to point out the Right Sector has been somewhat folded into other organizations. It’s declined. Other right-wing patriotic organizations are much more important now. It was run like a McDonald’s, unlike Azov, or something else. It was run like, basically, a chain franchise. And every Right Sector, in every town, was run by different guys. And a lot of those Right Sectors, it was just a local militia, paramilitary, crime groupuscoule that took on the name Right Sector. There was not one Right Sector. And by 2017-18, Right Sectors decline, now it’s not really as important.  There’s still people in organizations that call themselves Right Sector, but a lot of them have been dismantled by the Ukrainian intelligence services because they became, basically, foreign bandit structures. 

Claire: What I found, among the things that I found interesting about the interview was his defense of Bandera. 

Vlad: It’s great, yeah. 

Claire: It’s great. I mean, it’s obviously a bit revisionist. But it does suggest how Ukrainians view Bandera. It’s so repellent, from the outside, because we know who he is. But they obviously do not have an accurate historical portrait of him. 

Vlad: Well, first of all, yeah—there’s a lot to say on that. Yeah, they don’t know who Bandera was, first of all.  Secondly, there’s a lot of Soviet propaganda about Bandera, so when they embrace Bandera, it’s like a “Screw you” to the Russian-Soviet mentality and Soviet narrative. That’s one thing. Another thing is that Bandera is a pet project of certain ideological people, without naming their names, who came to power in 2014 with the Poroshenko administration. And it was really a regional phenomenon that captured, in national memory politics, the country overall. So Bandera is not something that anyone in Chernihiv or Odessa, in the South—Chernihiv is in the north—or certainly in Kharkiv, care about. He has nothing to do with the history of the Donbas, even very, very, very right-wing Ukrainian nationalists from Donbas cities like Mariupol or Lugansk or Donetsk.  They have other heroes that they’re more into. You talk to really, really, really right-wing Ukrainian guys or, you know, whatever, patriotic guys from these—you know, groupuscules or, you know, the guys who fight in the military conflicts—and they don’t care about Bandera. Bandera is very much a Western Ukrainian thing that was hoisted, in terms of memory policy, onto the rest of the country. In a perfect world, that would not be the historical antecedent for resistance that the Ukrainians would look at. 

Claire: It’s not doing Ukrainians any favors, because people who want to—

Vlad: Well, here’s the thing. As a Ukrainian Jew, I accept Bandera. It’s  Shukhevich and other people who I don’t like. They’re much worse characters. than Bandera, one. Two, I like the Zhytomyr-Bandera flag. I wore my red-and-black Zhytomyr-Bandera flag with a red-and-black Magen David in Uman and I had—Israelis were like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m a Zhytomyr-Bandera.” And they’re like, “What the hell? Bandera is good?”  I said, “No. I mean, this is post-Bandera. This is appropriation.”

Claire: There’s two Banderas.  There’s the historic Bandera and there’s the Bandera who symbolizes something modern, and has nothing to do with the historic Bandera. 

Vlad: Correct. I mean, yes. 

Claire: But I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read your book. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right.  The valorization of OUN is, as the kids nowadays say, problematic. But also, you know, there’s a war on and I’m not going to tell Ukrainians whose statues to put up. I went to see Zelensky’s first prime minister, without naming his name, a week before the war started. I was doing the rounds in Kyiv, seeing politicians, you know, seeing who’s going to do what during the war. It was already obvious that there was going to be a war. And it was, like, a week before the war started, and I went to see Zelensky’s former prime minister, a technocratic prime minister. I said, “What do you think about Bandera?”

We had a long conversation. He’s like, “Well, it’s our history.”

I was like, “Yeah. I know. I know.”

And that was—that’s symbolized, for me, the reaction, which was like—shrug—“Well, that’s our history.” And I said, “We respect that. Yeah, I respect that as a Ukrainian Jew.” Ukrainian Jews mostly don’t care. It’s outsider Jews who care. It’s Russian Jews who make an issue of it, and it’s Poles for whom it’s a real problem, you know? 

Claire: Yeah.

Vlad: Look, I have a friend who is a hipster, he’s an Odessa-born conceptual artist, he’s a hipster, he lives in Berlin, he makes conceptual art, he’s my friend, and he once made a jocular—it was very hilarious—Bandera-themed musical, and the theme song of the song, written by my friend, a Jew from Odessa, a conceptual artist, was, “Was he a villain or was he a hero?”

Claire: I just want to read one little bit of this interview before moving on to the next chapter. You ask him, you say to the Right Sector spokesman, “The Right Sector is also often accused of being quite reactionary on the question of LGBT rights, gay rights. What’s your relationship personally and also as a party toward gays?” And he says:

The infringement of LGBT rights is, much like anti-Semitism, a real and substantive problem. But I don’t know of a single country where homophobia doesn’t exist. I do not know of a country where there are no homophobes or xenophobes. Such people exist everywhere. Personally, I have no issues with LGBT and think this is a matter of personal freedom. … Yet even more than that, I, personally, want to go on the record as saying that I love the work of Freddie Mercury.

Vlad: Yeah, he’s a deeply parodical character. He’s got a left earring, and he’s got a cool jacket on. He’s like, “I love the gays. Right Sector, we love the gays.”

Claire: You tell him, “You come off as an honest guy and I believe you.” Did you believe everything he said? 

Vlad: In the moment, I don’t know what to think. 

Claire: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Vlad: I now know better. Anyway, he was reprimanded by the Central Committee of Right Sector right after this interview for unsanctioned statements about the gays. And then he was like—he was saying that about Freddie Mercury. Right Sector’s Central Committee and Politburo does not favor these comments in favor of Freddie Mercury. 

Claire: Alright, so the next chapter—I really admire the way you do this, it flows pretty naturally because you introduce Sheptytsky, is that how you pronounce it? 

Vlad: Yeah, Sheptytsky. Teah. And I write a lot about Sheptytsky in the book, yeah. 

Claire: Yeah, and it seems like you did a lot of archival research? Is this all your own research or are you drawing on the work of other scholars? You don’t have to answer that. 

Vlad: Look, I did talk to scholars. In fact, one very pedantic scholar accused me of, “This is such primitive reductionist garbage … ”  And I was like, “Welcome to journalism, brother.” I read everything that there was. A scholarly history in English, some in Ukrainian. I don’t read Polish very well, so I talked to sources who were au courant of the Polish scholarship. 

Claire: Yeah, yes. I just wanted to mention this—skipping around a little bit, but just before I forget it, there’s the incredible fact that on invading Crimea, Putin announced proudly, “The Jews there can now celebrate Rosh Hashanah again.”

Vlad: He’s like, “We’re doing it for the Jews. Now our brothers, the Jews, can celebrate Passover.” It was great. 

Claire: They’re looking at each other and saying, “We do this every year.”

Vlad: They do this every year. And what was funny was that the Chabad rabbis, it’s split Chabad down the middle, because the Chabad rabbis, they’re cousins, brothers, and brothers-in-law, and they’re all married to each other. And you literally had a split between the Russian and Ukrainian Chabad.  I don’t write about this in the book. It’s fascinating. And the rabbi in this aforementioned synagogue in Sevastopol was literally like the cousin of the rabbi in Kharkiv and the second cousin of a rabbi in Odessa by marriage. And they all had to put out competing statements in order to make the secular authorities in their new country happy. Which is always the case with Jews, you know? 

Claire: Did you see the, what is his status, the chief rabbi in Ukraine?  He put out a Frank Sinatra—him, singing Frank Sinatra, for Yom Kippur—

Vlad: Which one? Do you mean Dov Bleich? 

Claire: The one with the big bushy beard. 

Vlad: Oh yes, he’s very nice also. He’s a star now. I guess he wasn’t expecting that. So there are a couple of chief rabbis. We’re talking about Moshe Asman, Giuliani’s great friend. 

Claire: Hold on a second. I’ll find it for you. It’s Moshe Asman, yes. 

Vlad: It must be Moshe Asman. He’s a star. 

Claire: Do you know him? 

Vlad: I know all the rabbis. Yes, I know Moshe. I know Rabbi Asman, yes. Rabbi Asman is a real fighter. Moshe Asman, yeah. Rabbi Osman became a star in Ukrainian social media for his, like very over the top—

[Sound of singing rabbi ... ]

Claire: It’s great isn’t it? 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s funny because all the chief rabbis of Ukraine were either born in St. Petersburg or served in the Israeli Defense Forces. It’s all very funny. He’s become a media celebrity all over Ukraine for his over-the-top patriotism. Literally like a shotgun in one hand and a Torah in the other one. No Pasaran! They will not kill us! They will not take us to the nether regions! They will not pass!

Claire: Yeah, and God bless him. It’s so astonishing that Putin has managed to convince the number of Americans he’s convinced that he’s fighting Nazis. 

Vlad: Yeah, what’s astonishing about that? 

Claire: What’s astonishing is how effective the propaganda is. And how weak we’ve been in the face of it.

Vlad: Well take a step forward. You literally have a kind of, a new version of fascism. It’s very complicated. I’m not one of these people that refers to the ruzzists, the fascists, to Russian fascism. It is a postmodern regime with a new version of fascism. It’s not a complete Hitlerite-style regime in terms of political economy of the country. It doesn’t have total control, the regime, in the way that Hitler did. It’s not totally— 

Claire: I’m not fond of using the word fascism to describe these—

Vlad: —I’m not either. It’s fascism-light, or whatever. 

Claire: Fascism is a particular movement, in a particular period of time, that only made sense as a contraposition to Bolshevism. 

Vlad: That’s right.  There’s no more Bolshevism. And this regime does not have a—

Claire: —It doesn’t have a fascist theory.

Vlad: It doesn’t have a mystical, essentialist, vitalist component to it. Doesn’t have a theory. It’s a mishmash.  

Claire: It’s a tyranny. We have a good, old-fashioned word for that.

Vlad: It is a tyranny. Both forward-looking and backward-looking at the same time.  It's very interesting.  The reason I’m saying this: I don’t like the misusage of the word fascism. I don’t like it in America. I don’t like it in Eastern Europe. But it is kind of fascism. We do have a kind of fashy country, a dictatorial regime which is committing basically genocide against its neighbor in order to denazify a country run by Jews, basically. Yeah, I mean Ukraine, yeah. 

Claire: But did you see—was it yesterday? 

Vlad: I mean, I say, run by Jews, in a funny way. But like the president, his chief of staff, and the defense minister upon the invasion were Jews. And when he got rid of the Jewish defense minister, he put in a Crimean Tatar Muslim defense minister. That’s not a Nazi regime, obviously. And you do have a kind of Nazi regime, a light-fashy regime trying to denazify aa country led by a secular Ukrainian Jew. 

Claire: It’s so distressing that Putin’s—that Russian propaganda has been as successful as it has been.e—

Vlad: That's how propaganda works. It’s successful. No? 

Claire: You would think that—when you have a climate of freedom of expression, the truth is supposed to rise up and defeat the lies. But it doesn’t seem to be. Rand Paul, yesterday or the day before, was standing up and going on about how Ukraine was corrupt—and, I mean, it is corrupt, but he was suggesting that Ukraine’s corruption and its repression of Christians and its—

Vlad: Well, he’s an opportunist. I mean, he and the people who make those arguments are opportunists. 

Claire: Well, he’s an opportunist along very particular lines. He just echoes Moscow’s line. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right. 

Claire: Cathy Young replied that this was objectionable in some way. I don’t remember the exact words. And the number of people who jumped in to echo what Rand Paul had said—very certain of it—they’re just certain that Ukraine is full of Nazis, profoundly—no better than Russia, certainly. No different from Russia. This is just some sort of conflict between one authoritarian thug and another. How can so many Americans believe something that is so abjectly stupid? 

Vlad: Because the legacy media has collapsed. 

Claire: No, the legacy media is not promoting this. 

Vlad: Well, look, you really want to get into media? No, the legacy media has collapsed. Because, after a couple of years of Russiagate, another stupidity, and the general collapse of the standards of the legacy media, no one trusts the legacy media. I mean, the media has only like 25 or 28 percent of American people who say that they respect it or trust it. It’s the least trusted institution in American life. So people have retreated into their own little epistemic bubbles, and Ukraine has become a heuristic for other sorts of culture war. And it’s cost-free. Everything that you, as a Republican or as a Conservative, might attack within America, there are costs and benefits within internal American culture war stuff. Ukraine is far away, most people have never been there. It’s cost-free, you can just bloviate about it and no one cares, right? 

Claire: We’re also in the age of instant communications on social media. You would think that people who are in doubt about this would just speak to a Ukrainian. 

Vlad: They’re not in doubt, they just don’t care, Claire. It’s different. 

Claire: You don’t sound as angry about this as you should be. 

Vlad: It’s funny that the Ukrainian nationalist is explaining to you why … the Ukrainian patriot is explaining to you why he’s not … I think some of those people are deceived—

Claire: The military aid is being held up, and might in fact stop completely if Trump is elected, because of this crap. 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, it doesn’t make me happy. I mean, I’m fighting against it. But, like, I understand the deep roots of it and the deep roots of it are partly the failure of American elites to tend to their own garden and keep up the credibility of their own institutions. And, you know, Ukrainians become a political football, especially with the Trumpets base. 

Claire: I don’t buy that this is the elite’s fault. It is the moral responsibility of people who refuse to inform themselves and get their news from enemy propaganda. 

Vlad: People are idiots. People are idiots. I don’t believe that the public has more responsibility or like even—

Claire: You mean they’re like dumb oxen? 

Vlad: Yeah, I’m kind of a misanthrope. I’m an Eastern European misanthrope. I don’t—I believe that, you know, like, the people who are spreading the propaganda, who should know better—everyone’s—the people who don’t understand Russia-gate or Ukraine-gate—those things are hard to understand. You have to have a lot of insider information and a good sense. And people have a lot to do. They have kids, they have busy lives. They rely on experts like me to explain things to them. And some of those experts failed, and some of those experts were in the media that spread Russia-gate. 

Claire: One thing that I was thinking reading this thought is, “It’s just going to go completely over the heads of the people who most need to read it. It’s just—it’s literate. It’s … they’re not going to read a book like this. 

Vlad: Look, if I sell 10,000 copies of an academic book about important things, about choosing Ukrainians, I’ll be happy. I didn’t get into this business—I would have gone into banking, like my father demanded, if I wanted popular success, you know? 

Claire: Yeah, but you just said, “It’s for me to explain these things to them.” So how are you going to explain it? 

Vlad: You found the contradiction, yes. The contradiction is internal. I believe the provenance of God and Claire Berlinski will get us through the long dark night.

Claire: I wish we had a president who was capable of using the bully pulpit to explain this. 

Vlad: Well, the president is playing a double game because he doesn’t want the Ukrainians to win. That’s the thing. He doesn’t care. I mean, he... I know so much. I know so much. 

Claire: Tell me what you know. 

Vlad: Some of it’s off the record. 

Claire Well, can you give, like, hints? 

Vlad: So, in a particular way, the failure of the Biden administration is the failure of Biden himself. Because he was the Obama Administration’s point man in Ukraine, in 2014 to 2016, until the Trump Administration came in. And it was his portfolio. Obama gave it to him. And since the Obama Administration did not want the Ukrainians to fight back. They said, “There’s no possible world in which we care about Ukraine more than the Russians do”—they kind of always, from the very beginning, tied the hands of the Ukrainians and how they could respond. So the Ukrainians muddled through and the Russians didn’t use enough force because they weren’t willing to go all-in. 

I mean, in order to achieve his policy objectives, Putin really should have invaded in this way in 2014. He would have taken the country. There was no army. He should have done that nine years ago, eight years ago, seven years ago. It’s too late. The Ukrainians had the chance to build state capacity and a very serious military apparatus, as people have noticed. Not nearly as serious as the Russian one, but, you know, serious enough to give a good fight. 

Claire: Well, without a navy, they’ve taken out the Black Sea Fleet! 

Vlad: They had a navy in 2014. Some of it defected and some of it was blown up by the Russians, sunk by the Russians. They don’t have a navy now, they did in 2014. 

The Biden Administration is in some ways doing a good job, in other ways it did not prepare the Ukrainians for the war, and it’s prolonged this war by a lot, by slow-rolling it. So I’m not one of these guys who thinks Biden’s doing good. I mean, I’ll defend him to Republican conservatives because—

Claire: We agree about this, but you suggested that you had some insight into Biden’s thinking. What happened to the Biden who was so outraged by what he saw in Ukraine that he said, in Poland, “This man cannot remain in power,” and his aides had to walk it back?

Vlad: Yeah, that was a great moment. I was there. I was there when he said it. Yeah, I wish that we still had that guy now. But the National Security Council around him is just too timid, and they are too afraid of the Russians and escalation, nuclear war, escalation in the Black Sea. You know, they’re just not ready to go full in. So they’ve made certain decisions that they want to slow roll this. They don’t want the Russians to win, but neither do they want them to lose too badly. 

Claire: That’s insane. It’s insane. It’s just the wrong posture, strategically. And what drives me crazy is that there’s no alternative. This is where a normal Republican Party should be making this criticism, and should be trustworthy with national security, and instead they’re a complete catastrophe and a disaster. 

Vlad: Yeah. 

Claire: I mean, I’m not saying that the fear of nuclear war is an insane fear. Of course I think it’s a very real thing to be afraid of. But the idea—you know, you either trust in deterrence or you don’t. I mean, going halfway is the worst strategy. Well, not the worst strategy. It’s the second-worst strategy. And I just don’t see that … you know, I think Trump will withdraw from NATO in his first day in power if he’s reelected. And I just don’t see Americans having a conversation about how serious this situation is and what this would mean for the security of the entire world. 

Vlad: Yeah. 

Claire: I don’t know what to do beyond what I say and what I do to get people to take it seriously. 

Vlad: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, will people read my book? Will it change any minds? If I change the minds of fifty people, if there are fifty good men? Should we level the city? I don’t know. Do you think fifty people will read my book and change their minds? Fifty, probably. Five hundred, yes. Five thousand, possibly. 

Claire: The book certainly changed my views and explained a lot to me. 

Vlad: Well, good, so okay, so let’s keep going, right? Do you believe in the power of a text? Do you believe in the power of a text, Claire? 

Claire: Absolutely, I do. 

Vlad: Very Jewish of you. 

Claire: Tell people about Andrey Sheptytsky.

Vlad: Andrey Sheptytsky was this very heroic and remarkable man. He was a giant, a gentle, beautiful giant. He was like a six-foot-nine Polish-Ukrainian aristocrat. He was the head of a Greco-Catholic Church during the war and he saved a lot of Jews. And he was pivotal for Jewish-Ukrainian relations. His brother Clement did a lot, also. 

Because of politics he was never named Righteous Amongst the Nations by Yad Vashem, which is of course a great oversight. It seems they very deliberately decided no not righteous enough. 

Claire: Its seems like more than an oversight. It seems they deliberately decided, “No, not righteous enough.”

Vlad: There’s a lot of politics there. I mean, the book gets into the politics. I wholeheartedly agree with the campaign to make them righteous amongst the nations. This is a good thing and we should do it and that would be one way of paying back debts. And there are a lot of very important and smart and influential people who work on that campaign. and I'd like to count myself amongst those people. But, you know, a lot of the people who ran Yad Vashem were Soviet Jews from the Russian side. The previous gentleman—

Claire: —Oh, Vlad. Page 80. You’ve got a big whopper here. “If Zelensky actually does become president of Ukraine?” 

Vlad: Well, I mean, this is a reprint. Right. In what context did I say this? Yeah, I didn’t notice that. 

Claire: You’re talking about Poroshenko and you say he’s not the only candidate playing the Jewish card. “Zelensky, the current frontrunner, is a 41-year-old Jewish comedian and actor whose primary suitability for the job is his experience having played a schoolteacher.”

Vlad: Well, I mean, it says at the end of the book—at the end of that essay—it was reprinted from 2018. I should put that at the front. 

Claire: Yeah, you should put it in the front. You should put it in the front. 

Vlad: Page 81, you say? My book is being edited in real time. Thank you so much, Claire.

Claire: You’re so welcome. You’re so welcome. One other thing before you go, you made an observation which I think is really important, which I'd never thought about, saying that the Holodomor should be understood as a Jewish catastrophe as well as Ukrainian, and I had never thought about that. I had never thought that that’s our history too. 

Vlad: So the Holodomor, of course, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews who were Ukrainians also. They were also in the countryside. You know, if you can’t get bread, you can’t get bread, doesn’t matter which religion or what color your eyes are. There were hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews who starved to death during the Holodomor because of the fact that they were Ukrainian peasants, rather than Jews, first and foremost. 

Claire: I wonder why that’s not more a part of Jewish memory. Is it because what happened subsequently just blotted out all other memory or is it because no one survived it to tell the story to their kids? 

Vlad: No, a lot of people survived it. The Jews who were in the countryside starved. The people who were in the cities didn’t have—I mean, the people went from the countryside went into the cities looking for food and they were more likely to survive in the cities. It’s in the countryside that people starved to death, right? Although, I mean, some people died in the cities also. But it did purge the countryside of the people who were living there. And so the Jews in the countryside were the ones that starved along with their Ukrainian farmer—peasant, whatever—neighbors. And a lot of it—

Claire: By definition, if you starve, you do not emigrate, you do not pass the memory of this down to your kids and your grandkids. 

Vlad: Yeah, but a lot of people who starved just ran away to the nearest city and found food there. Not everyone who’s starving died, some people survived. I mean, like millions of people died during the starvation, It was terrible. It was a Ukrainian catastrophe, but starvation does not target people based on religion or culture.

Claire: How many Jews perished in the Holodomor?

Vlad: I imagine it’s 100,000? It’s a question I’ve never seen interrogated. But you’ve got to remember that the large-scale starvation and the entire population of Ukraine watching people eating their children, eating their dog, dying in is streets with bloated bellies—the trauma of that, and the trauma of the communists going around killing peasants and taking away their land, it led to the preamble of what happens six years later. You have to understand that the Holodomor led to the trauma that partly allows the Holocaust to take place. I’m not saying that is the cause, clearly not, I’m not some sort of revisionist—

Claire: It led to devaluation of life and the toleration of obscenity 

Vlad: Well, I mean, like, it’s just—you’re living in a psychotic place. You’re living in a crazy place where people are dying, in a place where communists are running out of guns, where you just survived a brutal war and civil war ten years ago, nineteen years ago, your parents survived a brutal war. And then ten years ago, seven years ago, six-and-a-half years ago, people were starving to death. And now there’s an occupation and another war, and people are dying again—well, it contributes to an atmosphere of death. Of devastation, of destruction, of trauma. You know, it’s a cascade effect, that’s what I’m saying. 

I’m no way—please do not, anyone, call and accuse me of saying that the Holodomor led to the Holocaust in any way. What I’m saying, I think, and I’m trying to say it very precisely to not cause any historiological or revisionist issues, is that the suffering of the Holodomor created the atmosphere of trauma and, you know, being able to ignore trauma as a survival mechanism, that led to the capacity of the Nazis to kill people. Obviously, not the only reason. Clearly, it’s a multi-vector, multi-origin story, but it’s an underplayed aspect of a story that you don’t hear spoken about very often, which it should be. 

Claire: And as you point out later in the book, when you’re looking at contemporary Eastern Europe, especially when you’re looking at the emergence of far-right groups across the region, it has roots in the absence of a proper mourning of what has transpired in the past century. 

Vlad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, like the OUN. Even the OUN was a response to the loss of democratic self-governance. The Polish and the Ukrainians in the borderlands, Poland-Ukraine, started killing each other, whereas they lived harmoniously, more or less, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and they had devolved educational rights and cultural linguistic rights. Yeah? So a lot of the Polish-nationalist stuff and Ukrainian-nationalist stuff—with the Jews in between, of course, always, without guns—was an outcome of, you know, the destruction of democratic norms. I’m not saying the Austro-Hungarian empire was the most democratic place. It was sometimes very liberal. Especially in the outposts, like in Chernowitz, where my family was from, where Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles live together in some sort of productive, harmonious way until World War I, until the Bolshevik War, until the Communists, then the Nazis, the Polish Partition, all this. The Jews fall victims to various very nasty, very nasty things that happened because of—not them. I think that’s one way of putting it. Like the pogroms, the 1905 pogroms were peasant pogroms, but they were also—this was an effusion of unhappiness with the Tsarist state, right? These are the urban riots that the Tsarist regime was so petrified of. They didn’t want pogroms against the Jews. It was an effusion of the same kind of peasant rioting that would bring down the regime. Right? So UPA and the Volhynia massacres, this is an outcome of, you know, basic tribal warfare, right? I mean, I’m not apologizing for any of this. I’m trying to—

Claire: No, I’ll just read right from the book. You write, 

Arguments over who has suffered the most ultimately debase everyone involved. The extension of mutual empathy need not exclude anyone. The Jewish diaspora in Israel can do more to acknowledge the local particular history without undermining the unique horror of the Holocaust, just as Eastern Europeans need to be responsible and sensitive to historical realities as they craft post-Soviet national identities. But all that will require overcoming contemporary geopolitical realities on top of the already heavy burden of history. 

This is the thing. This war. The blood had barely dried when this war broke out. No one is getting any chance to come to terms in any way with any of these horrors. 

Vlad: Yeah, that’s right. That’s absolutely right. Yeah. 

Claire: All right. On that note, let’s draw this to a close because—

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much, Claire. I’m very grateful. There’s a lot to say. 

Claire: There is. 

Vlad: This book is a culmination of ten years of my work. I’m trying to—you know, having returned to the land of my ancestors, I’m a repatriate, of course. I’m a repat. This is where my ancestors are from. This is where my wife’s from. This is where my people are from. I have a deep identification with the Ukrainians and the Jews. These are my people. I’ve been criticized, by some Jews, for being too soft, but I don’t think so. 

I’m very empathetic to the understanding of the fact that what happened during World War II took place without the Ukrainians having their own states, you know, like the Germans had a German state, what they did was under the auspices of a German state. Neither the Poles nor the Ukrainians can be held to the same level of responsibility as can the French or the German populations who are governed by Frenchmen and Germans, right? Whatever happened during World War II, it happened under the auspices of occupation, and so the Ukrainian political nation, just like the Polish political nation, I—as a Jew—do not feel has the same level of responsibility as—

Claire: When you compare levels of responsibility with Hitler, it doesn’t suggest that there’s—there’s plenty of evil to go before you’re at Hitler's level of responsibility. 

Vlad: Yeah, but they did have their own state, is the point. And I’m very empathetic to that argument. Obviously, you couldn’t have those arguments, those historical arguments, before 2014. And the Ukrainian state went very far in having a very long-sided conversation, dialogue, within the country about all this, right? Not as much as it could have and also at the same time they were celebrating people like the Canadian gentleman, the Waffen-SS guy who stood up for the parliament. 

Claire: That was a screw-up. 

Vlad: That was a screw-up. That was a terrible, terrible screw-up. 

Claire: What does it say about Canada that no one present thought, “If he was fighting the Soviets, that means he was not a good guy?”

Vlad: Yeah, it’s kind of weird that they didn’t—that they don’t know the history. I I don’t know Canadians, but it’s obvious to me if he was fighting the Soviets he was on the bad side of things. I mean, obviously, a lot of Ukrainians were fighting the Soviets because they wanted their own country. They were fighting—

Claire: You know, our listeners might not know what we’re talking about 

Vlad: Claire, explain please. 

Claire: I don't remember his name, but when Zelensky was in Canada, they honored someone who was portrayed as a Ukrainian war hero, and—

Vlad: This gentleman’s name was Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought in the Waffen-SS. He was a veteran of the Waffen-SS and it was like the Galicia 1 division. The division was put together after a lot of the Holocaust, and historians say that the Galicia 1 Division didn’t actually, as a unit, do anything against the Jews. Obviously, a lot of the auxiliary policemen and soldiers and volunteers who joined up did kill Jews and did kill Poles. I mean, it’s an entire mess. 

Claire: Well the main thing is that you don’t honor a member of the Waffen-SS in the Canadian Parliament. But no one figured out that that’s what he was, because they just didn’t put two and two together. 

Vlad: Yeah, it’s like, you know, how do you not understand that a Canadian who fought against the Russians was fighting in the woods against the partisans, you know? 

Claire: It’s the kind of historic illiteracy that—do you remember when Reagan went to Bitburg? 

Vlad: I don’t because—

Claire: —right. For some reason, he was scheduled to go and lay a wreath at Bitburg. Where all these Waffen SS were buried. And there was a huge controversy about it when people realized this is not a good place for the American president to be going. But there was also this real worry that if he pulled out at the last minute, it would be very offensive. And no one was quite sure what protocol demanded. 

My grandfather had the solution to the problem. He was very proud of it. He said he should go. He should put down the wreath. Then he should unzip his trousers and piss on the grave. 

Vlad: That’s a … that’s a position. 

Claire : All right, I’m going to let you go. 

Vlad: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this great talk. It was really, really nice to talk to you about it. 

Claire: Everyone go out and buy this book. 

Vlad: It’s trending on Amazon.com. 

I’ve taken the paywall off this post to encourage you to share it widely. Do you have friends who think the Ukrainians are Nazis? Try sending this to them. What can it hurt?

 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Claire—I think you’ll find this was an especially interesting conversation. I’ve included a transcript for those of you who don’t like listening to podcasts, but I particularly recommend listening to this one.

CB: This is the Cosmopolitan Globalist and I’m Claire Berlinski, the host, and Vladislav Davidzon is my dear friend, neighbor as well, who is now Ukrainian. He is married to a Ukrainian woman. He was born in Tashkent, emigrated to the United States at the age of seven. So he is an authentic Cosmopolitan Globalist and he has been going back and forth from Paris to Ukraine since the beginning of the major war. We’ve had many, many podcasts with him, but we have a lot of new subscribers, so I’d like to introduce you a little bit more thoroughly for their benefit. Perhaps you could say a little bit about who you are, Vlad.

VD: Claire, so lovely to be back on with you. You are a wonderful journalist and a great thinker and a great writer and a very good Substacker. And I value our friendship. And it’s always nice when one of your friends is your neighbor. So many of the people that I like are not my neighbors. And some of the people that I do not like are my neighbors. So it’s always good when someone I like and want to spend time with is a neighbor. That is the case with you and me. So I am glad to be on, I think, for my fifth or sixth appearance on this august podcast.

And I am a writer. I’m a journalist. I’m an artist. I do many things. I wear many hats, as they say. I cannot sit still. And so that is why I do four or five or six or twelve things—not always perfectly, but I do them often competently, and often, I think, even in an interesting fashion. Some people think so. Some people don’t. Interest is subjective.

I have been writing about Ukraine for a very long time, more than a decade. I’m about to publish my second book on Ukraine. It’s called The Birth of a Political Nation, Jews and Ukrainians, 2013-2023. It’s a decade worth of my pieces on Ukrainians and Jews, which is a perennially fascinating theme and topic, and of course, now very topical because it is a very important theme to understand if one wants to understand the origins of this war.

CB: When is the pub date?

VD: What did the Pope do?

CB: The pub date.

VD: Oh, the pub date. The Pope said some very silly things today. That’s what the Pope did. The pub date is ... the joke about the Pope is that he just made some very imperialist, Third World-ist comments today in the news about Ukraine and the Russians being the inheritors of the patrimony of Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. And, of course, Ukrainians don’t think Catherine the Great is so great. They call her Catherine the Second because she repressed Ukrainian culture. Understandably. The pub date of my book is in about two months.

CB: Are we going to have a party?

VD: I would love that. Would you throw me a party?

CB: I would absolutely throw you a party. I would be delighted to throw you a pub party.

VD: We need a pub party. One in New York, one in Kyiv, one in London, one in Paris—

CB: Is my place big enough for you?

VD: I mean, yeah, let’s see. Yeah, I mean, we can have a little reading, I think, you know, thirty of our best people. What do you think?

CB: Well, we want everyone who might buy the book to come. Do you think we can fit them all in my apartment?

VD: I’m not sure, but you do have a nice courtyard.

CB: That’s true! We can do it in the courtyard if the weather’s—I mean, if it’s pouring, that won’t be any fun, but it would be an awfully nice place to do it, in the courtyard.

VD: We should definitely do it.

CB: We’ll either do it in my apartment or perhaps I could ask my father if we can borrow his apartment. But before that, you should also mention that you’ve written a book about Odessa, a collection of essays about Odessa, which is both beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking because we now know—this was all written before the war and every word is now pregnant with with horror and irony, because of course the life, the city, that you’re describing is—

VD: —being bombed. I have a big piece in Tablet, 4,000 words, which I think is long-form now, on the future of Odessa. It came out on Independence Day, August 24th, which is already about four days ago. It is a very long piece if one wants to understand what is happening to Odessa, before, of course, buying my book. It’s on Tablet Magazine.

CB: I’m so sorry, I didn’t see it and I didn’t know about it, even though I of course follow you on Twitter. And I ascribe this to the complete mess Elon Musk has made of Twitter. I would have very much liked to have read that before speaking to you. I’m really indignant that I didn’t.

VD: Well, it’s alright. There’s a lot there. I haven’t been to Odessa in a month. I just came back from Kyiv and Chernivtsi, so I have more to say generally about the counteroffensive, the political situation in Kyiv, the political thinking of normal people in Kyiv, than I have about Odessa, than I have about Odessa, which I haven’t seen in about a month, which I won’t be able to get to for another two weeks. So in two weeks we can talk about Odessa if you want.

CB: I want to talk about everything you just mentioned. They’re all on my list of things that I wanted to ask you about, as well as about the thinking of elites in Washington.

VD: Sure.

CB: So let’s go one by one. Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me what you’ve seen and the impression you have and what you think it means.

VD: So … I spent just now ten days in Ukraine. I go in and out and I’m based in Paris, and when I have big pieces to write I go into Ukraine and I’m often in Poland, I’m often in other places, I’m often traveling. I popped into Kyiv for a week, not having been there for a month and a half, to see what the political situation is. Kyiv is continuously evolving and the political situation is in flux. Except also very stoic and stable in many ways. It’s very interesting. A lot is changing and a lot is happening, except also not a lot. Things are very much the same as they were six months ago, in some ways, and in other ways not at all. Ukraine is culturally changing very quickly, and in a lot of ways it’s hard to predict where those changes are taking us.

CB: In what ways?

VD: Regional identities—like the internal debates between Ukrainians about various things, various issues, what people think the outcome of regional identity issues will be—the Ukrainization is taking place quicker in some places than others, you know—

CB: I feel like this is a bit euphemistic, can you explain in really simple terms what this means?

VD: What Ukrainianization taking place in different—so basically, my beloved Odessa was very ambivalent about the war, because they were deeply embedded in Russian culture and they didn’t particularly like the center, so they didn’t particularly try very hard to Ukrainianize, in either the linguistic or the cultural sense, but once the Russians started hitting the center of town with rockets—

CB: —Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.

VD: Correct. And I have a line, which I think is kind of amusing, in my piece where I say that there were many people who were ambivalent and remained ambivalent about Ukrainianization or their fidelity to the centralized Ukrainian state … even if they did not particularly agree with the Kremlin’s view that their apartments should be destroyed with cruise missiles.

CB: Right. So the debate in Kyiv about the pace of Ukrainianization, you say that it’s changed quickly—

VD: In Kyiv, it’s been the case that there have been no innovations in that debate in about a year. There are innovations in the way people are living in Kyiv, which is very interesting. They have two American patriot systems with anti-missile defense over the city, and so, unlike the rest of the country, missile defense is more or less not a problem in Kyiv, because obviously, it’s the capital and where all the ministries and everything are. They have almost total control of the airways there. unlike the rest of the country where you can get killed anytime, in Kyiv, people have more or less internalized the fact that the Russians can’t hit the city with anything except Kinzhal rockets, and even those can be sort of shot down two-thirds of the time now. So they party like it’s Tel Aviv, you know? It’s very much the part of Israelization, or the Israelification, or whatever you want to call it, of Ukraine. That the people in the capital have internalized the fact that they can go to discos and restaurants. The restaurants are full. You know, it’s really interesting.

CB: Yeah, I’ve heard that from other people too, who have been surprised by it, but of course anyone who’s been to Israel isn’t surprised by it, because that’s the classic dynamic—that people want with especial vigor to be part of life when death is so close by.

VD: Oh, absolutely. There’s a really vital element, but it’s really vital. I mean, there’s a stoicism, and a hedonism, and a camaraderie; it’s below the surface, but they know that at any moment this can be frustrated, or ruptured, by a rocket from the sky. It’s very interesting. It’s not, in any case, a form of evasion or anything of that sort. They know what’s going on. It’s not like they’re ignoring the obvious. But it’s very much like, okay, we’re gonna—

CB: —It’s completely to be expected, and of course there’s these idiotic propaganda memes on the internet to the effect of, “Look what they’re doing with our money, they’re going to discos.” Obviously anyone who has ever been anywhere near a conflict zone understands perfectly well the psychological dynamic at work … and the propaganda machine is in overdrive.

VD: People have to drink just to deal with it. People are in so much post-traumatic stress. Just three examples, I walked past a guy with a big dog and the dog was just all over the place. And it was a big fat dog. And the dog, I was trying to walk around the dog and I just, I kind of skipped and danced around the dog, but the dog was so either silly or stupid or fat that it just walked into me. And the guy just almost yelled at me, “Hey, watch my dog!” … Okay.

And then the next day, I see just a girl just walking around, poor thing, walking and just talking to herself, and just—her hands are trembling, and she was obviously mentally unstable. And my wife says to me, “There will be a lot more people like that, who are mentally fragile, who’ve been pushed over the edge.” This is just a girl in the middle of Kiev, you know?

CB: Of course, of course.

VD: So it’s a lot more mentally fragile people.

CB: It’s so goddamned unfair. People just lived their lives—and this catastrophe visits them. This catastrophe. They didn’t start, they didn’t want, they did nothing to deserve it—and these vulnerable people are attacked by this monster and it’s so goddamned unfair.

VD: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. And they’re so strong and so resilient and it’s so noble and they’re so amazing. I got there on the first night, and then I was supposed to see my friend Rebecca Harms, who’s a former German MP in the European Parliament, and we made plans to have breakfast around there in the hotel, and we embraced, and then at 3.30 in the morning the rocket alarm came—and you know, I usually ignore it, but you know it was the first time back in Kyiv for a long time so I went down into the basement of this four-star hotel.

CB: I saw the photo—

VD: There’s a photo of me lying in a parking lot and they set up these nice plush beds, really plush—

CB: Yeah, it looked very comfortable.

VD: It was very comfortable, but you’re in the middle of a very cold, freezing parking lot—

CB:—with a lot of strangers—

VD: —with a lot of strangers, and they put cookies out, and water out, and it was a very VIP way to live in a bomb shelter. I’ve been in many worse bomb shelters, much more uncomfortable. But, you know—

CB: It’s still a bomb shelter.

VD: It was still a bomb shelter. And all my Kyiv friends are like, “Oh, that’s so chic! Maybe I’ll go to the Radisson next time.” I was like, “Yeah, you should.” And people are writing me, “Oh, do they have mints on the pillows?” And then my friend, Rebecca Harms, the MP—I was thirty minutes late for breakfast because obviously I slept in the cold. And she said to me, “I saw you and I were the last ones who didn’t go up.” After they called off the alarm, I just decided to just roll over and sleep for the rest of the night in the parking lot. And she said, “I think you and I were the last ones in the parking lot.”

CB: Well, I mean, among other things, everyone’s been suffering from interrupted sleep for months and months, and that will do a number on your brain.

VD: That’s actually why the Russians shoot the rockets at three in the morning and not three in the afternoon.

CB: I mean, that’s no joke. It’s extremely difficult to retain your emotional stability if you’re not getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, basically, most nights. And I can only imagine how many people are feeling as if they’re just losing it because of that.

VD: But again, the Russians know that very well, and they’re doing that because they’re torturing the population into fleeing and surrendering, obviously.

CB: It’s become impossible to think of the Russians as anything but monsters.

VD: I mean, there’s this viciousness to what they’re doing. It’s just absolutely brutal, and brutalist, and it’s just really hard to understand for people who are not from the region.

CB: I don’t want to dehumanize any people. And I do feel that the conscripts who are being plucked up from the boonies and sent there as punishment, who are completely unwilling, are to be pitied, but—

VD: Some of them.

CB: Some of them. But the people making these decisions, and the Russians who are perfectly aware that this is happening, and celebrate it, I can’t feel anything for them but utter rage and contempt.

VD: Contempt, yeah. Contempt, yeah. Contempt is the only correct emotion.

CB: And rage. Rage.

VD: Rage and contempt. Yeah. That’s right.

CB: And I don’t like feeling this way, but I feel it all the time.

VD: Well let’s talk about the politics.

CB: Okay. First of all, Prigozhin.

VD: Oh, Prigozhin. So I left Ukraine, sadly, the day he died. And so I didn’t get to talk to Ukrainian MPs and watch their glee on the day he died. I would have preferred to have seen the glee and to have been there for the party when he died. And of course, he died on Ukrainian Independence Day.

CB: Well that’s fitting.

VD: Yeah, it was great.

CB: It’s kind of surprising, though, because, you know, Putin really likes anniversaries and you wouldn’t think he would choose that one.

VD: Well, it was the two-month anniversary of his putsch and mutiny. It wasn't the two-month anniversary of ... It wasn’t the year-long anniversary.

CB: Usually, though, he likes to give himself an assassination on his birthday or something like that. So to do it on Ukrainian Independence Day is a little bit atypical. Who the hell was stupid enough to get into a plane with him?

VD: Well, I mean, the Wall Street Journal has excellent reporting today on him returning back to Russia, frantically trying to run around and retain control of the militia as the MOD, the Ministry of Defense, was closing in and taking over. I mean, they were competing missions, he had to run around Africa talking to the same Arab and African warlords and dictators and presidents assuring them that he was still in charge just as the Deputy Minister of Defense [Yunus-Bek] Evkurov, or whatever his name is, was flying around saying from now on, this is a military-to-military, state-to-state operation and you have to stop talking to these people. So [Prigozhin] flew in just the day before from Africa and he was trying very hard to keep his corporation from being swallowed up by the states.

CB: It sounds as if he sincerely believed the promise that he would be left alone. I mean, he’d have never returned anywhere near if he didn’t.

VD: He miscalculated. I think he miscalculated. He freaked out and he was given, I think, rock-hard assurances. There were two meetings in the Kremlin with Putin, apparently. And I just think he thought that he was too important to Russian needs in Africa, obviously. This isn’t going to change anything in Niger, where I’m told by my people it was the Russian intelligence services. The GRU military intelligence guys who fomented that coup and took over that country, like in Mali.

CB: That’s worth a podcast in itself. I would love to talk to you more about that. But—

VD: Let’s put that aside. Obviously, you’re in the middle of a world-historical pivot in Africa from post-European, post-colonial stewardship. Let’s call it that.

CB: What the demise of Wagner means for Africa is such an important story and so under-covered. But I want to try to organize this podcast in a logical way. So let’s put this toward the end of it, because I want to just run through some more obvious things. What does his death mean for the war in Ukraine?

VD: The death … on the war in Ukraine, in the short term, nothing, because the Wagner guys have already been pushed off the front. They’re not fighting there anyway. So it seems that the Ministry of Defense in Russia has made a choice that the Wagner guys who participated in the coup will not be allowed to take contracts with the Defense Ministry. So, like, the 2,000 to 4,000 who actually marched on the Kremlin will probably not be allowed back into the Ministry of Defense unless that means that they can only join the newly-formed Russian mercenary units. That might mean that they can only join mercenary units and not the army proper.

CB: But is there anyone else who has ever had any success fighting there?

VD: Where? In Ukraine?

CB: Yeah.

VD: Yeah, well I mean look, not all the Russian battalions are bad. Some of them are really bad and some of them are really competent or moderately competent. The Naval Infantry is good. The Spetsnaz is fine. I think the 76th is fine. They have very competent units and then they have very green units full of mobilized men. The Kadyrovites fight fine, even though they’re more interested in taking selfies of themselves than fighting.

CB: How many Kadyrovites are there now?

VD: I mean, it’s below 20,000, I suppose. I mean, totally. I think there must be 5,000 to 7,000 now in Ukraine, from what I hear. They get taken in and out, and they often get into, like, screaming matches, fistfights, and shooting matches with Russian guys. So nobody actually wants to serve with them from the Russian army. And a lot of their job is actually to stand behind mobilized Russian conscripts and shoot them in the back if they run, so like, no one likes them—and in fact, I’ve been told over and over again by by Ukrainian officers, that are like, you know, committed to not shooting their enemies, that one of their issues is keeping their soldiers from executing Kadyrovites instead of taking them POW. So … you know, it’s an understandable problem, when someone behaves very badly.

CB: Is there any concern among the Kadyrovites that leaving home might not be a good idea because there’s no one to repress them back home?

VD: Well, I don’t talk to many Kadyrovites. The Chechens I talk to are typically on the Ukrainian side, so I have no special insight into what the Kadyrovites are thinking. It’s an interesting expansion, extension of the Chechen Civil War, but you have Chechens on both sides. And they like killing each other.

CB: Yeah, I’m sure.

VD: Often the Ukrainian Chechens ask to be on the spots on the front line where they’re killing Russian Chechens. They really like shooting at each other. It’s a great pleasure.

CB: Well, I mean, Chechnya is being held together by sheer terror, and if these are the best forces, and if they’re all out of town, doesn’t that present interesting opportunities for people who want to get rid of them?

VD: I mean, I don’t think that there is any kind of possibility at this point to get rid of him by using force. I don’t know who, internally, would be doing that. But I’m not sure that that is plausible at this point.

CB: My next question is—it’s a combination question, two questions. What is actually going on in the war? And why are we seeing these bizarre leaks from the US Defense Department? To what end are we seeing them? And what do they mean?

VD: Okay, more great questions. Okay, so obviously the counteroffensive was just not going as quickly as people want it to go, and the Ukrainians both overhyped it to themselves and to the Americans, because they needed support, and then the Americans and the media overhyped it, and then the Ukrainians felt pressure because they wanted to get gains and the gains weren’t happening quickly enough, and then the Americans started pushing them to get gains quicker, and they said, “No, we don’t want to mincemeat our soldiers, because unlike the Russians we don’t have reserves of men.” So there’s this really kind of unpleasant cycle of over-expectation, bartering for expectation, pushing for more results, resentment, followed by bad leaks from the Pentagon, followed by unpleasant resentments. You understand. You understand, I think.

CB: Yeah. I’m wondering, though, is there any truth to the planted stories that the Ukrainians are disregarding specific advice from the US and the UK and from NATO for a decisive maneuver operation, you know, sort of a Schwerpunkt initiative, in favor of smaller unit actions to attrit Russian forces—is this—do we know for sure that this was the advice they were given?

VD: This was the advice that was given. This has been widely reported and I believe it’s probably true. And also from what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard, and even from what I’ve heard from American trainers of these guys, volunteers, all— obviously there’s no on-the-ground American troops—was that the Ukrainians were just not good at combined arms maneuvers. They just couldn’t get that right. And so it was the case that at a certain point, the Ukrainians were being given the wrong kinds of strategic advice and actually—

CB: Especially because we were refusing to give them F-16s and ATACMs.

VD: Yeah, exactly. I mean, what NATO general would expect results with that kind of Iraq War I or even Iraq War II—

CB: I mean, how do you pierce their main defensive lines if you can’t hit the logistics and the supply depots?

VD: That’s right. It’s just too hard. And so the Ukrainians are like, “Let’s just go back to what we’re good at, which is using long-range attacks to attrit armor and to attrit the artillery and destroy logistics, to attrit logistical hubs, to make logistics harder, to make Russian repair and reconstruction more difficult, to get troops to collapse.” You know, these are these are very difficult choices that they have to make. These are really difficult choices—

CB: No kidding.

VD: And you know, in some ways these are roughly equal forces, in some ways, one side has morale, the other one doesn’t. One has Western intelligence, one doesn’t. One has more numbers, which is the Russians, one has the capacity to send their men to their certain death, without caring about them. One is able to replenish quicker than the other. I mean, obviously, Russia has three-and-a-half times the population. So in some ways, the Ukrainians have the upper hand, they’re fighting on their own territory; in other ways the Russians have upper hand. And so by some criteria the Ukrainians should be doing better, by other criteria, they’re fighting a really tough war—

CB: But it is not, as reported, a stalemate. The Ukrainians are making steady but slow progress.

VD: They are making steady and slow progress, and they may very well just break out somewhere in the South. And hit the Azov Sea by September, at which point they’ll be able to target Crimea with long-range artillery, right?

CB: You think that’s still plausible?

VD: It is plausible. It’s becoming less plausible, but I think it’s possible at this point that they’ll still reach the Azov Sea by the end of September. It’s not outside of the range of possibility.

CB: Did you—we republished a terrific article by one of our writers, Thomas Gregg, [also] one of our readers, comparing the situation to the one faced by the German and Allied armies in Normandy after the consolidation of the Allied bridgehead. Did you read that piece? Because I thought it was super-insightful.

VD: No, I did not. Well, tell me what he said in a few brief words and I can tell you.

CB: I can actually read the key paragraph. D-Day was 6 June 1944, and by early July that bridgehead extended from the vicinity of Caen in the east to the Atlantic Ocean south of the Cotentin Peninsula. From that point forward, the Allied objective was to break out of the bridgehead. The German objective was to prevent a breakout, or more realistically, to delay it as long as possible. The Overlord Plan had called for the early capture of the city of Caen in the high ground beyond the city, to ensure that the British Second Army sector of the bridgehead was sufficiently deep to accommodate follow-on forces in preparation for a breakout. The Germans, for their part, realized that an Allied breakout in the Caen sector would open the way to Paris and trigger the collapse of their whole line, so they fought hard to prevent that.

On D-Day and for weeks afterwards, the defenders managed to repel every British attempt to take the city. Even when Caen itself was finally captured, the Germans still clung to the high ground beyond. And you can see all these parallels here. Now this was under Montgomery, who was the primary author of Overlord, and the failure to take Caen compelled him to modify his plans. So, in his view, from then on, the British would continue to act offensively on the Allied left flank, threatening a breakout and attracting German reserves to that sector, in order to facilitate a breakout by the US First Army on the opposite flank.

The American attack was codenamed COBRA. It would go south, then east, and it would unhinge the German left flank, and if all went well, it would encircle and destroy the German defenders of Normandy, the Seventh Army facing the Americans and the Fifth Panzer Army facing the British.

VD: Yeah, that’s great. That’s absolutely great because it gives you a flavor of just the kinds of strategic choices that the Ukrainians have to make. Like, do you put half your army at Zaporizhia in order to keep the Russians from pushing into Zaporizhia while not putting enough troops on the south? Do you put all of your troops into one combined push and then you put them into a Russian kill zone? Or do you put more troops than you need to in Bakhmut in order to keep the Russians there?

CB: Exactly. It’s a really good analogy. It’s one that hadn’t occurred to me and I thought it was extremely, extremely shrewd of him to point it out. And he also points out at the time that Montgomery was taking incessant criticism He was infuriating the Americans because he was saying, “Everything’s going to plan,” and the Americans, who saw that the original scheme had failed, were beside themselves. And Churchill was just as irritated. He wanted to see [Montgomery] sacked.

But behind the scenes, as Gregg points out, the military situation was developing as Montgomery intended, and the threat in Caen forced the Germans to commit most of their Panzer divisions there, and the German strength against the Americans gradually dwindled away.

Now here’s the point of difference: The Allied air superiority was effective in isolating the battlefield by interdicting the movement of German reinforcements and supplies. So when COBRA was launched, on July 25th, the Americans soon scored a deep breakthrough, leading to the collapse of the German line. So the encirclement of the defending forces didn’t come off, but the German army in northern France was shattered. And the retreat of its remnants only came to a halt on the western border of the Reich.

Can this be done without the kind of air power brought to bear in that situation?

VD: I mean—whoops, so my computer fell on the ground. That’s okay. That happens. See, this is what happens.

CB: I didn’t even hear it.

VD: That’s good. Obviously, it’s a very similar situation, in that you have to make very, very, very complex judgments. And then also you have to lie to your allies as well as to your enemies. And the Americans and the British are micromanaging the war in a kind of uncomfortable way—but they are giving the rockets and the intelligence coordinates. So in a sense they do get a they get a veto on where the shooting takes place. I wish—I wish they would just be more patient. I wish there’d be less of these articles continuously attacking Ukraine—

CB: Alright, yeah. What the hell is that all about? That is the last thing the world—

VD: Yeah, it’s so bad. But also the casualties are so stunningly bad and so crippling to the Ukrainians that the morale in Kyiv is, kind of, a sense of understanding that every week the Ukrainian army is losing a thousand to a thousand five hundred KIA, and they can’t take those kinds of casualties for very long. So, you know, you don’t get to do this again. The Ukrainians do not have the manpower. And the West does not have the tech, the guns, the ammunition, the planes. Well, I mean, we do have the planes and the tanks, but we just don’t have the capacity to give them another shot at it.

CB: I mean, these leaks themselves are a disaster. They’re a disastrous example of the administration’s—well, I mean, there was an article about this in, I think it was The Bulwark; it was written by Eric Edelman and I can’t remember who his co-author was. Did you see it? He said—

VD: No, I didn’t. I wrote for them at the start of the war, I haven’t seen what they’ve been covering.

CB: He just published it, and it’s excellent. And they write, it’s a disastrous example of the administration—the Biden administration’s “seeming inability to understand the information environment in which the war is taking place and the requirements for sustaining public support for US engagement commitment over the long haul.”

And they’re absolutely right. They’re just handing ammunition to detractors in Congress, for allocating supplemental funding. And it’s an already parlous legislative environment, as they point out. Members from both parties are balking at approving additional support. And now they’re giving their opponents their talking points! Right? I mean, they’re saying, “Why throw good money after bad? The counter-offensive is failing.” And this is going to be endlessly repeated on Tucker Carlson and by Vivek Ramaswamy. And why are they allowing this to happen?

VD: Because they’re allowing this to happen because they want this to go away before the election. They’re allowing this to happen because they’d really like the Ukrainians either to win something big and for the Russians to sue for an armistice so this goes away before the election—

CB: If they want them to win, give them the f*****g—I’m sorry, excuse me—if you want them to win, give them the weapons they need!

VD: I couldn’t agree with you more, Claire, but I’m explaining how they think. I don’t work for the administration, thankfully. I mean, they don’t want the Ukrainians to lose, but neither do they particularly want them to win.

CB: I don’t understand this. I mean, winning would be great for the election.

VD: I don’t think that in their hearts of hearts, they do think that the Ukrainians are capable of winning before the election. I just don’t think that ... You know, there’s a great comment from ProfessorPhillips P. OBrien—

CB: Yeah, I admire him very much.

VD: He’s good, yeah. He writes, “After the last two weeks, I think Pentagon anonymous sources need a proper holiday. Not just a long weekend, but two weeks at the beach. No phone. Would be better for everybody.”

CB: These “anonymous sources” are causing real damage to American national security. Can’t they control them? Because—

VD: I think they are controlling. I think they’re doing it to shape operational and strategic expectations.

CB: But why? Why are they acting against American interests?

VD: I just think that their interest is to get re-elected. I don’t think that they think that the Ukrainians can win this.

CB: How does this get them re-elected? I mean, how does making it sound as if this is just another Afghanistan get them re-elected?

VD: It shouldn’t, but it doesn’t look great, honestly.

CB: What do you think is the narrative they’re trying to create?

VD: I think that they want to allow the public to think that they did this very well and then just have a kind of armistice somewhere around spring of 2024 before the elections really get going, so you could say, “Look, we’ve brought an honorable peace to this.” They can’t allow this to go on and on. And they know that at a certain point, Republicans will run with this and the public will get tired—

CB: An armistice? An armistice? You think they really just want an armistice that allows Russia to rearm and then take this up again as soon as they’re rested and ready?

VD: I think at a certain point, if you’re someone like Mr. Jake Sullivan or his people, you start to think, “Well, even if that is the case, we’ve destroyed 50 percent of Russian military capacity. And even if they take three, four years to rearm, by the time we’re back in office in ‘25, we’ll be able to deal with this better.” I think in their heart of hearts, they think like that.

CB: I cannot imagine thinking like that. I can’t imagine being so unpatriotic that you would think that this is going to be something that Americans will be in a position to face better then than they are now.

VD: For them this is a distraction from what they really want to focus on, China and going back to the JCPOA. The deal with the Iranians.

CB: Well, as for the latter, I have a lot to say about that. But if this is supposed to be a distraction from China—anyone with a brain can see that China is watching this.

VD: Of course.CB: And if we fail to support an ally who is an actual country, a UN member, appropriately—with whom we signed the Budapest Memorandum—the Chinese are really going to believe that we’re going to sacrifice American blood for Taiwan? Come on.

VD: Yeah.

CB: I mean, it’s just … I can’t imagine that people who have been around as long as they have, and who have as much experience as they have, and seen as much of the world as they have, and who have—in Sullivan’s case—a background in national security, who’ve read quite deeply in the field, and are being advised by some pretty smart people, I suppose, could really think this. It’s inconceivable.

VD: Yeah. It’s inconceivable. My sense of talking to people in Kyiv at the MP level, and elite bureaucrats, and strategic people is that they don’t want to look ungrateful, and they’re still thinking that things could be okay, and that they got enough—but they really, really, really want those F-16s. And if this goes badly, the population isn’t going to turn on the army. I asked a couple of MPs, “If this goes badly, will the population turn on the Army?” And they said no, but they could become very, very, very aggrieved in ways that would not be great for American standing the world.

CB: Yeah.

VD: Can you imagine what the commentary in the international media would make Americans look like if Ukrainians were saying, “Well, look, we got screwed over, we got stabbed in the back, you didn’t give us what we needed to win, now we’ve had to make this armistice with the Russians”—

CB: They don’t even need to say it, it’s just obvious! They wouldn’t even need to say it, but I mean … do you think that Ukrainians... I don’t know whether anyone would talk about this openly, but of course my first thought is, if I’m Ukrainian: “I want the Bomb.”

VD: Yeah, there was a lot of talk about restarting the Ukrainian nuclear missile program after they didn’t get what they wanted at the Vilnius NATO conference, which was some sort of rhetorical elucidation of—

CB: A lot of talk among whom?

VD: Ukrainian Twittersphere—

CB: Yeah.

VD: —Ukrainian elites mouthing off on Facebook for about 48 hours. There was a lot of talk about, “We need our own nuclear arms, blah, blah, blah.” But it was it was obviously serious, in that these are elite people. These are people in the ministries. These are high-level civil society people. These are MPs—

CB: How could they be thinking otherwise? This is another thing where I just don’t understand what the US security establishment is thinking, because it’s so obvious that this is what’s going to happen if we don’t get our fingers out of our asses—and that is it for the NPT. Poland would be next, obviously.

VD: Sure, sure.

CB: And you have an arms race.

VD: Sure, sure. I get that from Poland. I have to tell you, this example, there will never be another country ever again that willingly gives up its nuclear weapons Never.

CB: Never. Never. We now have Libya and Ukraine as the examples of what happens if you do.

VD: And to some extent South Africa.

CB: South Africa actually is the counter-example, I would say. But South Africa wasn’t facing the same security environment.

VD: Yeah, not at all. Just to say, there are three or four examples of countries who had the technical capacity to break through but did not go all the way with their nuclear program.

CB: And under these circumstances we’re trying to negotiate with Iran?

VD: Right, it’s laughable. I spent a lot of time just explaining to Ukrainian MPs and foreign MPs over the last week and a half what the effect of the Obama JCPOA was on Iran and on Israel, and they nodded gravely, and I had to explain to them—even the very smart ones who just didn’t understand how the dots linked together—that the Syrians and the Ukrainians were just collateral damage to the JCPOA.

CB: Exactly.

VD: But once I explained it to them, no one argued against me. They were like, “Yeah, yeah, that sounds right.” I had that conversation with one former and two or three current MPs over the last week and a half. And it was interesting because they’re like, “Oh, okay, that sounds right. Oh, f**k.”

CB: F**k. You know, the problem is, I just don’t see how the United States is capable, in its current condition, of pursuing an intelligible foreign policy that’s in the American and global interest, from administration to administration, given its level of not only total dysfunction and polarization, but the level of complete ignorance of the rest of the world. I mean, the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy is the most depressing thing I’ve seen since the rise of Donald Trump.

VD: Well, yeah. And in some ways he makes Donald Trump almost look noble. It’s insane.

CB: Well, at least Donald Trump is stupid enough that you can’t blame him for being stupid—he isn’t capable of understanding anything more sophisticated than what he says.

VD: And Donald Trump also has some, like, old-man, set-in-his-ways policies that he first stumbled his way into in the ‘80s. Like, you can almost kind of understand. With this Vivek guy, it’s like …. what the hell. You know?

CB: I’m not going to defend Donald Trump. But Vivek Ramaswamy is someone who is pure fraud. I mean, whatever we may say about Harvard, you don’t get to graduate cum laude from Harvard and be an idiot. And he also graduated from Yale.

VD: So you think he’s not an idiot?

CB: He’s not an idiot at all. He’s highly intelligent. And he is a complete charlatan who has seen what Trump was capable of achieving and decided he wants to do the same. And he will say whatever it takes.

VD: Well, I’m sorry that the Republican Party is in that space. But let’s talk more about Ukraine. I also just went to the Chernivtsi, the Odessa Film Festival in exile in Chernivtsi. I spent three days watching contemporary Ukrainian film and writing, and I’m putting out a piece on the state of Ukrainian film in the world now. That was interesting.

CB: What did you see?

VD: I saw, like, six documentaries. I saw three fiction films and a couple of—three or four fiction films. The Ukrainians are now screening the last of the major fiction films and non-fiction films, which were made right before the war started. So in fact I’m actually in two of them as a minor bit player. My friend has a film called Do You Love Me? Tonia Noyabrova, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian filmmaker, nice Jewish girl by the way, I’m in the film playing myself as Drunken Intellectual Number Two.

CB: Yeah, you mentioned that on the last [podcast], are any of these films—

VD: Good? Yes.

CB: —of the kind that could be shown in Europe and in the United States, and make it clear what the situation is?

VD: Well, so here’s the thing, the Ukrainians are stopping to make, if I can use that phraseology, are ceasing to make, fiction. But they’re making tons of documentaries, all of them noble, all of them well-intentioned, some of them good, some of them well-made, some of them not as great, some of them utterly brilliant, all of them very noble and well-intentioned. One that I saw was particularly melodramatic. And manipulative, actually. In the Q&A, some people accused it of being manipulative, rightly. So there are the reenactment melodrama versions of the war which are, you know, very cheap documentaries. But there are a lot of remarkable documentaries coming out of Ukraine, they will be all over the film festivals, and there will just be many many many more of them —

CB: Are they going to be widely screened in the US?

VD: I don’t know, I’m going to write about them in Tablet in my column—

CB: Are there deals with Netflix, for example?

VD: Some of them are like made-for-Ukrainian-TV quality? One was 42 minutes long and it was shown on evening Ukrainian television—all of Ukraine watches the same television because the six major TV stations joined forces for one marathon, and every Ukrainian watches the same news, which is good for stitching the population together.

CB: It’s actually, it’s really important. Because I was thinking about this. I was thinking Americans learned about the Second World War—those who didn’t fight it—from the movies. And that’s why Americans knew, have always known, that Hitler was the bad guy. And they’ve always understood the general contours of the conflict, what happened. And one of the reasons is because Jews did control Hollywood, and we did

VD: —Claire, we’re not going to be talking about the Jews controlling Hollywood.

CB: No, it’s just a fact. They were just severely, you know—they were, wildly overrepresented in Hollywood. And this ensured that a reasonably accurate portrayal of the Second World War was common to the average American. Now, of course, you don’t get all Americans sitting in front of the same film anymore It’s completely, the film environment is completely …. How would you describe it? It used to be that once upon a time, everyone went to see the same movie. Well, I guess they sort of did just now, with Oppenheimer and Barbie, but it used to be for all movies, there was this kind of simultaneous release, and then everyone was talking about the same movie.

VD: There was one culture as opposed to many.

CB: Yeah, exactly. So everyone would see The Bridge Over the River Kwai at the same time and everyone saw Schindler’s List at the same time. But this is the way to communicate with Americans in a way that they might understand the stakes a lot better than some article in Foreign Policy.

VD: Some of these documentaries are, like, not bad—Ukrainian-evening-news quality—and some of these are Oscar-level works of art. They’re really interesting. And there will be a lot more of them.

CB: Will they be accessible to Americans?

VD: I think some of them will be forgotten by time, and some of them will get lucky and will get good distribution deals. And I hope maybe my article will help with that a little bit. We’ll see.

CB: I feel such a sense of desperation at trying to counter the onslaught of Russian and fellow-traveler propaganda in the United States, which is so powerful. And you know, I don’t think Americans are bad people. I really don’t think these people in the heartland who have come to believe that Ukraine is a Nazi country that’s totally corrupt, and the Russians are the good guys, I don’t think they believe this because they’re evil people. I think they’ve just been systematically misled.

VD: Well, I mean, look, there are a lot of issues with the fact that Ukraine was just in all sorts of bad ways on the wrong side of the Trump political thing, in the last three years. Some Ukrainians behaved badly during the 2016 elections, some Ukrainians tried to intervene on behalf of—

CB: Yeah, but it’s also a massive information operation onslaught, just massive.

VD: Sure. Correct. But also, not to defend them, but I understand the National Conservatives are thinking, “Well, what’s in it for me? No one’s taking care of me. Why are we taking care of these Ukrainians?”

CB: I could sit down with any one of those national conservatives and explain what’s in it for them, and if they were—

VD: Sadly, I don’t have 50,000 Claire Berlinskis to send to every town in America.

CB: That’s the problem.

VD: If I did, the world would be a better place, but I don’t.

CB: This is what I’m preoccupied by. How can it be the case, especially because God knows why, but not one of our politicians is capable of explaining it. And I have no idea why it is that our politicians are incapable of sitting down with the American people—I mean, Biden hasn’t given one single damn speech—incapable of sitting down and explaining, “Look, here’s how the world works. Here’s what happened in the wake of the Second World War. And this is why we are prosperous and we are powerful. And it comes with certain responsibilities and obligations, and it is very much in our interest to keep up our side of the bargain, because if not, we’re going to be like any other American country, which is to say, like Mexico, or like Brazil, or like Peru. We’ll be that irrelevant and that poor. This is the world we made and we benefited from, and not only did we make it and benefit from it, so did everyone else—because you know, otherwise, the Code Pink narrative has completely infected the National Conservative side, where they’re completely willing to believe that to the extent this is true it’s because we’ve created a system of imperialism that benefits only us. And when you consider the amount of wealth and peace that the world has been blessed with since the Pax Americana, and consider going back to the world before that …. it is so horrifying. It’s so horrifying. It makes me utterly sick to think that so many Americans do not understand this. And I don’t know how to get it across to them.

VD: Yeah, I don’t either. I really don’t either. I’m hoping that, I’m hoping that this film that I worked on, that Sean Penn made, about Zelensky, which will be out on September 18—

CB: In America on September 18?

VD: The superpower film, the Sean Penn documentary about Zelensky, on which I was a producer, that is out in two weeks.

CB: In America.

VD: Yes, in America. It’s been bought by Universal, it is going to be out on Universal Plus or whatever it’s called. I forget the name of the streaming that Universal owns. I believe it’s called … it’s called … it’s called Paramount Plus. It will be streaming on September 18th. The film is done. It’s going to be great. We premiered it in Berlin. I’m in the film hanging out with Zelensky the night before with Sean Penn, right as he goes to see Zelensky. I’m with Sean Penn the night before the war having dinner with some journalists and some writers and we’re arguing—

CB: How did the audience react to it?

VD: I think the audience really enjoyed it, because it’s a really powerful film. I was at the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. There are a couple of scenes where people laugh. He really got a great sense of civil society. He got really good people into the film and it was very compelling, this film. And I think people will think the same.

CB: Chris Christie has been doing a good job. I mean, he wasn’t great in the debate, but he has been doing a good job of going to—

VD: Fine, yeah. I’d vote for him.

CB: I’d vote for him. He’s been doing a good job with—well, I can’t really forgive him for his four years of kissing Trump’s ass, but—

VD: A lot of other people did, also.

CB: It doesn’t make it right. But he would certainly be a more powerful spokesman for the global order that Americans created than Biden seems to be capable of being.

VD: Yeah, Haley and Chris Christie are the reasonable, sane, competent foreign policy wing of the of the Republican Party—

CB: Yeah, and Pence, but you know, they hate them.

VD: Well, what can you do? I mean the party will right itself. This is a Thermidorian reaction to the neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party This is a backlash. They’re trying something else. The Republican Party—

CB: What happens to Ukraine? What are people in Ukraine saying about what happens if Trump is reelected?

VD: I’m gonna put this in my piece. I went to see a bunch of MPs and I talked to a lot of them, and I went to see one of Poroshenko’s top guys. Poroshenko only has 27 MPs in parliament now. His faction is not huge, but it’s still influential. He’s in the opposition and the fact that he was winnowed down from 125 MPs to 27, he kept his best top 20 percent of his party in the slots that he got.

CB: He’s behaved well, he’s behaved honorably.

VD: Yeah, he’s fine. Yeah, he’s done very well. And I think he would have done just as well as Zelensky, although probably he wouldn’t have been as successful at channeling the country and the world into helping—

CB: Zelensky has a world historical talent for—

VD: Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

CB: In some places, yeah.

VD: And Poroshenko has only kept 20 percent of his MPs, so he kept the best top 27. So his 27 MPs are, you know, they’re talented people, right? The less talented, the less intelligent, the less powerful thinkers and orators, they were not given party seats on the list because obviously, he got wiped out in 2019.

But I talked to a bunch of his MPs. And I went to see one of his top guys, who’s very bright, and I’ve had a relationship [with him] for many years. And I said, “Are you concerned about Trump? Is everyone concerned? And he said to me, “Everybody. Everybody. Everybody.” And then emphatically one last time, the fourth time he said, “Everybody is concerned about Trump.” He said it four times.

CB: Well, rightly so. Rightly so.

VD: He said “everybody” four times, like he was crossing himself, you know?

CB: And that’s true throughout Europe. It’s true throughout Europe. I mean, do you think that if the US basically drops off the map, that there’s any possibility of Europe being able to unite itself, get itself together, and continue to provide Ukraine with what it needs?

VD: Europe simply does not have what is necessary in terms of arms production. We’re not—we’ve, by “we,” I mean the Americans, kept the Europeans from having enough arms production and military industrial plant—

CB: But there is no plan in Europe to begin producing. That’s what appalls me.

VD: Right, yeah, but there’s no plant. Even if they were going to do it, it’s not possible. With the exception of the Brits and the French. The Brits have the capacity and they’re doing stuff and they’re doing a lot of stuff secretly and they’re recalibrating their factories to make the kinds of things that the Ukrainians need. But again, it’s just not enough.

CB: You can’t tell me that an advanced technological society like Europe is incapable, if the will were there, of embarking upon a massive rearmament program.

VD: Yeah, but it’s not going to be soon enough for the Ukrainians to win the war. That’ll take two years or three years minimum. They’re buying up what they need from the South Koreans because the South Koreans make a lot, a lot of shells.

CB: And the South Koreans sure understand what’s at stake.

VD: The South Koreans are being very helpful, but it’s not enough. The amount of shells that the Ukrainians need is just gargantuan. And if the Americans fall off, it’s not apparent that the Estonians or—you know, the Latvians, who are giving like 2 percent of their GDP to the Ukrainian army. Even if you get 50 percent of the Latvian GDP to the Ukrainian army, then what? It’s still not enough.

CB: If the EU was capable of coming together for the Covid fund, and capable of coming together, not particularly well, but capable of coming together to deal with the refugee crisis and the financial crisis, surely they should be capable of coming together for something that’s about a hundred times more important.

VD: You’d think so, wouldn’t you? You’d think so.

CB: I don’t understand why they aren’t.

VD: Well, they’ve done about as well as could be expected. Some countries are worse. The Italians and, well the Germans are okay now. The Hungarians are, of course, a problem.

CB: So the Germans are not really okay. Are you looking at the statistics on the AfD?

VD: Well, I mean, that is real. But I mean, they’ve started giving a lot of weapons and a lot of support. I mean, it’s not anywhere where it should be. And it took a year longer than necessary. But, you know, again, the closer you are to the Russian border, the more you’re willing to give up one or two percent of your GDP to the Ukrainian army. That’s obvious. But again, it’s about the Americans. It’s just not there. The capacity is not there. It’s an American fight, you know.

CB: But I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why there’s not absolute panic. Why there’s not a realistic understanding that Trump could win. Why they don’t see this as a life and death issue—which it is.

VD: It is, yes.

CB: Most people, when someone mugs them in a dark alley and puts a knife against their throats, have a fight-or-flight reaction. Where’s the fight-or-flight reaction? Where’s the adrenaline dump?

VD: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know, noble Claire, I just don’t know.

CB: Who would know? Who could explain this to us?

VD: I mean, you really have to go country by country to talk to different Europeans. I think that a lot of European bureaucracy is starting to understand in a way that they didn’t a year ago. Even Macron really, I think, based on my conversations with people who talked to him and his people, they really understand that the Russians need to lose now. I think Macron really changed.

CB: Yeah, Macron has, you know, he has come around with the vigor of a convert.

VD: Yeah, that’s really interesting. That was not the case three months into the war.

CB: No, it sure wasn’t.It sure wasn’t.

CB: He has just ... he’s had a come to Jesus moment. I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but he gets it now.

VD: He does get it, and I think if you’d been the one ...

CB Maybe from Africa?

VD: Yeah, and too little too late. I mean, the French really screwed that up. I mean, it’s a really big problem, for the French especially, because this is their backyard and it’s their nuclear energy—for the resources that they need was coming from Africa.

CB: Yeah, well, they’ve lost Françafrique. And that’s, I mean, that is a stunning loss. It’s a stunning loss and part of it is entirely their fault. But another part of it is Russia’s fault.

VD. Well, I mean, they were told. By French intelligence. “You should just rush the gendarmes, the special forces to surround the palace,” you know, and they didn’t do it.

CB: Were they? I thought the controversy was they weren’t told by the intelligence.

VD: There’s different views on that, but I think they made the wrong decision at the wrong moment. They could have stepped in. And, you know, there are American bases there. I mean, the Americans use that country to fight terrorism all over the region.

CB: I know.

VD: Also, very badly. Terrorist attacks are up like 30,000 percent since the American bases opened up.

CB: Yeah, I mean, causation isn’t correlation, but certainly whatever the West has been trying is not working. And this is a huge problem. It’s never, ever reported anywhere in the US. I mean, it’s ISIS redux all over a, again, a completely innocent population is being brutalized. Brutalized isn’t even strong enough. It’s being massacred, it’s being tortured, and no one cares. No one cares. And now we’ve lost a very significant military base. And I don’t think Biden’s calling attention to it because, you know, it’s not the sort of thing you want to advertise, but it’s a foreign policy setback on the order of losing Afghanistan.

VD: Yeah, it’s like the closing of the third American embassy in the course of a year and a half, you know? Like Kabul, then Kyiv, which obviously is thankfully working again, on a voluntary basis—nobody’s working there who doesn’t want to be there, and they’re working really hard, and they’re really, you know, overpowered—but they’re doing their best. And now they’ve lost in just a year and a half, what is it, three American embassies had to be shut down? That’s kind of a catastrophe in terms of running foreign policy.

CB: It is a catastrophe. And this is the moment, with Wagner’s fate up in the air, to be trying to recoup those losses.

VD: Yeah, I think it’s a bit too late. I think the Russians have made inroads. And also, just like—I think the Africans—well, there isn’t one African polity or group, but I think a lot of—

CB: Well, there is almost like a single African when it comes to France. They just hate France.

VD: Yeah, I guess that’s right. Yeah, you look at you look at Libya where the Russians are doing very well, you look at Mali, you look at Central African Republic, you look, major Russian inroads everywhere, the Egyptians are are back on board with the Russians … it’s just a catastrophe. We’re just losing. It really is like a domino effect—

CB: Yeah.

VD: —like the Vietnam-era domino effect, all over again. In some ways it’s like the Soviet Union minus communism, you know—

CB: And I just don’t think we are fully appreciating the effect of the information operations. I mean, the French certainly have screwed themselves. And also there’s, you know—the colonial past has an infinite power over people’s minds. But it doesn’t help that Macron has been just stupid in the way he’s approached them. I mean, Macron has a particular gift for alienating people and for not understanding the sensitivities of a situation. So, I mean, in part you can blame the French for their own fate, but the bulk of Russian information operations are being directed toward Africa, and they work. They work.

VD: They’re doing fine, yeah. They’re doing very well. I mean, this was a coordinated operation. Niger, I’m told, by people who know a lot about it, took six months.

CB: What else did you hear?

VD: That the French were caught flat-footed, that the French were being squeezed out. I mean, they got rid of the French ambassador, they got rid of the American ambassador very quickly. The African countries around who were willing to send in a force were told by Nigeria to stand down. It’s just—I know that the word “shitshow” was popularized and made bourgeois by one Barack Hussein Obama, but let’s call it a shitshow.

CB: Yeah. Well, the ECOWAS intervention idea was lunacy from the beginning. But the signs were there beforehand and people weren’t paying attention to them. They weren’t taking them seriously. And why they weren’t taking them seriously after everything that's happened, I do not know.

VD: I don’t know. Maybe Ukraine, Russia, distracted a lot of people. I just don't know. Maybe we really can’t chew—

CB: —can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?

VD: Yeah. Maybe we can only look at one part of the world at the same time.

CB: But we have—different parts of our bureaucracy are dedicated to this. We have Africa Desks in the intelligence agencies, in the Defense Department, in the State Department, we have—

VD: —sure, but then you have to get the army and the civilian command to make decisions based on that information. You could have perfect information on the Africa Desk and then no one does anything about it because the political elite just doesn’t have enough bandwidth to concentrate or isn’t smart enough to know what they should be doing somewhere.

CB: But I mean, we used to be able to do this. Nixon would not have allowed this to fly under the radar.

VD: Totally. And that’s right. I mean, and even in many ways, Reagan wouldn’t have.

CB: No, not at all.

VD: Even Clinton probably wouldn’t have dropped the ball on something like this either.

CB: Yeah, I don’t think he would have. And certainly Bush wouldn’t have. The first Bush wouldn’t have.

VD: First Bush was not the kind of man who would not have been able to concentrate on four or five different policy areas at once. Yeah. Let’s start wrapping up because it’s getting late here. Anything else you want to ask?

CB: Checking my list of questions so that I haven’t forgotten something important. I have on my list, “Can Ukraine do this without the materiel they need?” Do they have—is it theoretically possible for them to push Russia out with what they have?

VD: I think it’s very difficult. I think they could push them out of particular areas and make Crimea unlivable, and make the Russians, in certain instances, come to their senses and make a deal. But obviously they need some sort of pervasive victory. Otherwise, the Russians are just not going to take the lessons that they need to and decommunize and de-imperialize, or whatever … de-de … using all the “de-” words. Obviously, it will be a Black Swan event that brings this to an end. That cannot be predicted by anybody. I’m sure it’s not going to be a coup d’état or a revolt of Russian elites as people keep—

CB: Who did you speak to in Ukraine?

VD: Sorry?

CB: Who did you speak to in Ukraine?

VD: I talked to a lot of people. I talked to ... I tried to talk to ordinary people, also. I went and I saw some old male friends I hadn't seen in a while, just regular guys who I like. One of them was telling me what he was doing to avoid conscription. Just a nice coffee with an ordinary pal I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. He lost his job in logistics and he had to work shucking oysters and he was just telling me that he was just really concerned about conscription. He didn’t want to go to fight. There’s a lot of guys like that.

I talked to intellectuals. I talked to a well-known philosopher. I talked to policy people. I talked to some diplomats. I saw six to eight former and current MPs in a week. I saw a former finance minister. I saw a former minister for foreign affairs, I saw some government people, think tank people. You know, I make the rounds.

CB: Among the higher-level people, the people who might actually know what's going on and be in charge of making policy, what five adjectives would you say describe their state of mind?

VD: Oh, that’s such a great question. … One, befuddlement. Two, stoicism. Three, resignation. Four, leniency, with the army and American elites and even with me, the way I was talking to them.

CB: Leniency, you mean like indulgence?

VD: Yeah, just like understanding. Like, okay, you know—I asked a former national security advisor who had also been a finance minister—it’s actually entirely obvious to Ukraine hands who this is—I said to him, “So, are you resentful of the Americans?” And he had to think for a second, and he was like, “Actually, not really.” He said, “Ultimately, they could be doing more, but you know, they’re doing enough, and we’re doing our best.” He was actually wearing fatigues. He was in the middle of—you know, he was actually wearing fatigues and fighting. I ran into him in my hotel and we sat down, we had lunch, and whatever … he was taking calls, buying up drones, between talking to me and doing deals for drones. So he had left civilian life and political life in order to go into the army.

Among Zelensky’s opponents, there’s a lot of frustration. Politics is about to start up again. Politics was submerged for a long time and it was taboo. But the taboo on politics is about to come off.

CB: How so?

VD: There’s a lot of the beginnings of maneuvering. It’s been two, three months where Ukrainian internal politics has begun to rekindle. You can’t really go out and criticize the president or the foreign minister or Yermak or any of these people yet. But you can—

CB: What’s the gravamen of the complaint?

VD: Well, the Poroshenko people have sort of hysterical complaints about this being a dictatorship and blah blah blah. And they have a point that, you know, they’re not being really consulted with. But you do have martial law, and Zelensky does have a supermajority in parliament, so you don’t really need to consult with an opposition that has 27 seats, you know? Or 15 seats, in another party.

And that, you know, there’s internal ... I’m almost skeptical about relaying these things because it’s a lot of the usual b******g, but they will have rather overblown and overwrought versions of reasonable complaints.

CB: But are they complaining about the way the war has been prosecuted?

VD: No, no, no, they’re not. No, no one is.

CB: Right.

VD: No one is. No, no one is criticizing the army. No one is criticizing Zelensky’s decisions. It’s entirely about internal stuff, like corruption, or—and Zelensky is trying to fight corruption.

CB: He is coming out swinging against it.

VD: Well, yeah, Burns went in there, the CIA guy, telling him you have to go hard against corruption, because for a long time the West was looking the other way, because we didn’t want to delegitimize the Ukrainian state in the middle of a war. It’s a really difficult thing—are you going to criticize the Ukrainians about corruption in the middle of a war? Obviously, Zelensky’s not corrupt. And Ukraine being what it is, there is corruption and they’re doing what they can. They’re trying to make corruption treasonous in the middle of a war.

CB: Yeah, I just read that this morning.

VD: And it’s very controversial, because if you call it treason, that’s something that goes not to the anti-corruption court, but to the security services which are controlled by the executive branch, so that is a checks-and-balances issue. I mean, obviously, I think corruption is treasonous in the middle of a war, but if you give it to the internal intelligence services to decide what that means as opposed to the anti—

CB: Well, it’s definitely treasonous, because it’s treasonous inherently, because it’s detracting from the war effort, but it’s also being used as propaganda—

VD: Totally. Yeah, totally. It is treasonous. I mean, I agree. And Zelensky saw that a lot of young men on the front were resentful of other young men who were not on the front paying US$6,000 to get out.

CB: Imagine that, yeah, of course, of course.

VD: Of course they were. Like, you’re fighting and dying and giving up your health in the trenches and some kid from a wealthier family than yours gives up US$10,000 to an army recruiter—

CB: Yeah, that’s outrageous.

VD: And Zelensky fired, unilaterally, every head of recruitment—-

CB: Yeah, yeah. Head of the regional recruitment offices, yeah, I saw that.

VD: And that was very popular, but that was that was an internal move that wasn’t for external consumption. That was to make people internally understand that they were fighting corruption. It was a good move.

CB: It was a good move externally too, though.

VD: I don’t know, you tell me.

CB: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know whether anyone in the US pays the slightest bit of attention to the actual news from Ukraine or whether they just get it all from, you know, Gateway Pundit. All right, before we wrap up, what would you—what are the five things you would like our listeners to understand about the situation that you think they might not know?

VD: Five things. Oh, like five more adjectives. Okay, one, the Ukrainians will not blame themselves or blame their troops or their generals for things going wrong. Things could still go wrong. The Russians famously do very bad at the beginning of the wars and then they get their stuff together, and then they beat back the French or the Germans.

CB: Or the Finns. Exactly.

VD: They’re famously haphazardly organized and really bad at the beginning of a conflict and then they get it together. So you just have to keep with the Ukrainians for another year and a half.

Two, any conversation about a ceasefire outside of the Ukrainians’ timetable puts lives at risk, because it makes the generals have to rush battles when the civilian elites tell them, “Look, you really have to deliver something or else the Americans, or Trump, or whoever, are going to stop delivering weapons.”

CB: And it encourages Putin.

VD: Yeah, it encourages Putin. So all the stuff about a ceasefire and putting pressure on the Ukrainians to negotiate, that is almost sadistically terrible. It’s almost horrible.

CB: Yeah.

VD: Three, the Ukrainians are running out of men. They’re really running out of men who are willing to fight. Everyone who wanted to go fight is already out the front and many of them are already dead. Ukraine does not have reserves of manpower. It just does not. The Russians do. The Russians are capable of full mobilization, of war mobilization, of conscription, of sending more ethnic minorities to fight. They are willing to grind this out. The Ukrainians are going to run out of men, men and women, sooner rather than later. So that’s where we are. That’s number three. Number four …. You know, this really … well, I wanna say something cliche about changing the world historical order, blah blah blah … Let’s skip that.

CB: No, let’s not. This is a pivot point. It is the most important story in the world. And the next century, at least, will be determined by the outcome. And if Americans do the wrong thing, the consequences will be so dark, so unfathomably dark for so many millions of people, for so long, that—61 percent of the people listening are Americans, according to my stats, and I just want them to understand that this is so much more important than any other issue that’s being discussed in the US right now.

VD: Yeah, it really—I mean, I don’t know. I really am a one-issue voter at this point—

CB: Me too.

VD: —so maybe my perspective’s being, you know, I have skin in the game, I have family in the game—

CB: I don’t. But I feel the same way.

VD: I’m glad to hear that. Aren’t I your family, Claire, in a way?

CB: Yes, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, if you told me the most important issue in the world right now was—I don’t know—fusion power, I would say, “Yeah, that’s a nice hobby horse and maybe it’ll happen,” but I wouldn’t get as excited—well, fusion power would be a really big deal. And that’s a bad example.

VD: Let’s try alien invasion. The alien invasion really puts this Ukrainian-Russian thing to—

CB: Okay, no, no these are bad examples. Let’s choose a good example. If you told me the most important issue was transgender bathrooms, okay, I mean—I’d say “Yeah, with you with the transgender bathrooms, but it just doesn’t matter compared to this.”

VD: Correct. Transgender bathrooms matter somewhat to some people in some places and it’s—

CB: —we’ll get that sorted sooner or later, but the world does not depend on getting it right.

VD: I do want to figure that out, in some way, but it’s not, it will not determine the course of our civilization, liberty and all that, in the way … This war really is good against evil. I despise when people use that rhetoric, but—

CB: —But this is the clearest case of it we’ve seen since Hitler.

VD: Correct. In every other conflict, everyone has a point. The Russians have no point in this situation.

CB: I want to caution Americans that anyone who tells them otherwise is never to be listened to or trusted again.

VD: Yeah, Mr. Tucker Carlson has a lot to answer for.

CB: And Vivek Ramaswamy. And yeah, I mean, it’s a bright line.

VD: They’re opportunists, they’re grifters and opportunists. Last question, what do you think? Last point, last question?

CB: No, I want your view about what is the last point that you don’t think they know.

VD: Last point that they don’t think they know.

CB: That you don’t think they already know. The thing you want to communicate. that you think they might not know, about what’s going on.

VD: You know, the traumatic stress that is on a society, I think, will spread into Europe, and I think will demoralize Europe.

CB: You mean literally, in terms of the refugees? Or—

VD: Yeah, I mean there are eight, there are like six to eight million Ukrainians, or five million, or whatever, I mean that’s between 1-2 percent, that’s not nothing. They’re obviously grouped in some countries, not others; they’re obviously in Romania and Poland, and Germany. There’s a million, there’s a million Ukrainians in Germany, and half of them have been honest to pollsters that they’re not going back.

CB: Or in a larger sense that Europeans, even if they don’t consciously admit it to themselves, understand that if Ukraine falls, they’re next?

VD: Well, I think it could very well in a couple of years, if Ukraine falls, make NATO obsolete. And, I mean, the Russians will try some salami-style tactics on Latvia or Lithuania or Estonia or whatever.

CB: Oh, absolutely.

VD: But I just think that that kind of trauma, with six to eight million people, and if the Ukrainian state falls, there will be, obviously, millions more refugees into Europe. I think it will just do something to demoralize the European project.

CB: Well, you know that shudder of horror that you always feel when you read First World War poetry?

VD: Yes.

CB: When you read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” those lines, and you think about it, and you think about the trenches, and you think about the gas masks, and how it gives you that shiver, that kind of sense of a hand coming from the grave around your neck. That’s happening for real, right now.

VD: It’s happening for real, it's happening to my friends, to my family, to everybody that I know. And again, if this war is fought successfully from the Russian side, this is just going to be a crippling add-on effect to a really bad ten years for the European Union. You have 2015, Syrian refugee crisis, then you have the Germans and the Greeks, then you have Brexit, then you have Trump and NATO. It’s like body blow after body blow after body blow every couple of years, right? And how many of these body blows can an institutional idea which is based on an optimistic, humane, idealistic view of the future—how many such body blows can it take? I think this will just maybe tip the European project over. You think I’m wrong?

CB: And I want to interject here. There is a large cohort of Americans who will say, “Well, so what? Why do we care about Europe? We pulled their chestnuts out of the fire twice in the last century. It’s time for them to go it alone. Why is this our business?” And I would answer—

VD: —Why is it our business, Claire?

CB: —Because it’s the West. Because this is us.

VD: This is us. Yes. Americans are descendants of the European project.

CB: This is our people. And the difference between America and Europe is—any belief that there’s a difference is the narcissism of small differences. This is the Western tradition. This is where we come from. This is where what we believe comes from.

VD: Like the Latin Empire protecting the Greeks because that was their patrimony and their historical—

CB: Exactly. And, you know, with our allies, we are mighty. With American allies, we do not need to worry about China and Russia. Together, we are so much more powerful. But if they break us up, they win, and the world belongs to despots, tyrants, and authoritarians. And the whole thing is ever so much more sinister, as Churchill said, by the lights of perverted science.

VD: Amen, Claire. Amen. And I think I cannot possibly say anything more honest or correct or germane or articulate. So I’m going to say thank you so much for having me on again. I hope I’ve said something of interest and I’ll see you Sunday, yeah?

CB: Yeah, yeah. I’ll see you Sunday and bring anyone you want.

VD: I’ll only bring nice people.

CB: Okay. Here’s a hug for you.

VD: Thank you to all our listeners for listening to us. Bye bye.

CB: Bye bye.

If you enjoyed listening to this Cosmopolicast, you might also enjoy these earlier conversations between Claire and Vladislav:

* The CosmoRussyaCast (feat. Monique Camara, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Scott Abel, and Jon Nighswander)

* The View from Kyiv (feat. Olga Tokariuk)

* From Kyiv to Chernowitz Vladislav rescues his relatives.

* The News from Odessa (feat. Monique Camara and Vivek Kelkar)

* Burning Vlad’s Russian Passport (feat. Toomas Hendrik Ilves)

* Ukraine and the Ghosts of the Iraq War

* The Angels and Demons of Odessa (feat. David Patrikarikos)

* Ukraine, Russia, the War, and the West (feat. Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon)

* The Ukrainian Literature Cosmopolicast (feat. Kate Tsurkan)

* The Counteroffensive and the Dam

* What the Hell was That? (feat. Ariel Cohen) On the Prigozhin mutiny.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Claire—I think you’ll find this was an especially interesting conversation. I’ve included a transcript for those of you who don’t like listening to podcasts, but I particularly recommend listening to this one.

CB: This is the Cosmopolitan Globalist and I’m Claire Berlinski, the host, and Vladislav Davidzon is my dear friend, neighbor as well, who is now Ukrainian. He is married to a Ukrainian woman. He was born in Tashkent, emigrated to the United States at the age of seven. So he is an authentic Cosmopolitan Globalist and he has been going back and forth from Paris to Ukraine since the beginning of the major war. We’ve had many, many podcasts with him, but we have a lot of new subscribers, so I’d like to introduce you a little bit more thoroughly for their benefit. Perhaps you could say a little bit about who you are, Vlad.

VD: Claire, so lovely to be back on with you. You are a wonderful journalist and a great thinker and a great writer and a very good Substacker. And I value our friendship. And it’s always nice when one of your friends is your neighbor. So many of the people that I like are not my neighbors. And some of the people that I do not like are my neighbors. So it’s always good when someone I like and want to spend time with is a neighbor. That is the case with you and me. So I am glad to be on, I think, for my fifth or sixth appearance on this august podcast.

And I am a writer. I’m a journalist. I’m an artist. I do many things. I wear many hats, as they say. I cannot sit still. And so that is why I do four or five or six or twelve things—not always perfectly, but I do them often competently, and often, I think, even in an interesting fashion. Some people think so. Some people don’t. Interest is subjective.

I have been writing about Ukraine for a very long time, more than a decade. I’m about to publish my second book on Ukraine. It’s called The Birth of a Political Nation, Jews and Ukrainians, 2013-2023. It’s a decade worth of my pieces on Ukrainians and Jews, which is a perennially fascinating theme and topic, and of course, now very topical because it is a very important theme to understand if one wants to understand the origins of this war.

CB: When is the pub date?

VD: What did the Pope do?

CB: The pub date.

VD: Oh, the pub date. The Pope said some very silly things today. That’s what the Pope did. The pub date is ... the joke about the Pope is that he just made some very imperialist, Third World-ist comments today in the news about Ukraine and the Russians being the inheritors of the patrimony of Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. And, of course, Ukrainians don’t think Catherine the Great is so great. They call her Catherine the Second because she repressed Ukrainian culture. Understandably. The pub date of my book is in about two months.

CB: Are we going to have a party?

VD: I would love that. Would you throw me a party?

CB: I would absolutely throw you a party. I would be delighted to throw you a pub party.

VD: We need a pub party. One in New York, one in Kyiv, one in London, one in Paris—

CB: Is my place big enough for you?

VD: I mean, yeah, let’s see. Yeah, I mean, we can have a little reading, I think, you know, thirty of our best people. What do you think?

CB: Well, we want everyone who might buy the book to come. Do you think we can fit them all in my apartment?

VD: I’m not sure, but you do have a nice courtyard.

CB: That’s true! We can do it in the courtyard if the weather’s—I mean, if it’s pouring, that won’t be any fun, but it would be an awfully nice place to do it, in the courtyard.

VD: We should definitely do it.

CB: We’ll either do it in my apartment or perhaps I could ask my father if we can borrow his apartment. But before that, you should also mention that you’ve written a book about Odessa, a collection of essays about Odessa, which is both beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking because we now know—this was all written before the war and every word is now pregnant with with horror and irony, because of course the life, the city, that you’re describing is—

VD: —being bombed. I have a big piece in Tablet, 4,000 words, which I think is long-form now, on the future of Odessa. It came out on Independence Day, August 24th, which is already about four days ago. It is a very long piece if one wants to understand what is happening to Odessa, before, of course, buying my book. It’s on Tablet Magazine.

CB: I’m so sorry, I didn’t see it and I didn’t know about it, even though I of course follow you on Twitter. And I ascribe this to the complete mess Elon Musk has made of Twitter. I would have very much liked to have read that before speaking to you. I’m really indignant that I didn’t.

VD: Well, it’s alright. There’s a lot there. I haven’t been to Odessa in a month. I just came back from Kyiv and Chernivtsi, so I have more to say generally about the counteroffensive, the political situation in Kyiv, the political thinking of normal people in Kyiv, than I have about Odessa, than I have about Odessa, which I haven’t seen in about a month, which I won’t be able to get to for another two weeks. So in two weeks we can talk about Odessa if you want.

CB: I want to talk about everything you just mentioned. They’re all on my list of things that I wanted to ask you about, as well as about the thinking of elites in Washington.

VD: Sure.

CB: So let’s go one by one. Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me what you’ve seen and the impression you have and what you think it means.

VD: So … I spent just now ten days in Ukraine. I go in and out and I’m based in Paris, and when I have big pieces to write I go into Ukraine and I’m often in Poland, I’m often in other places, I’m often traveling. I popped into Kyiv for a week, not having been there for a month and a half, to see what the political situation is. Kyiv is continuously evolving and the political situation is in flux. Except also very stoic and stable in many ways. It’s very interesting. A lot is changing and a lot is happening, except also not a lot. Things are very much the same as they were six months ago, in some ways, and in other ways not at all. Ukraine is culturally changing very quickly, and in a lot of ways it’s hard to predict where those changes are taking us.

CB: In what ways?

VD: Regional identities—like the internal debates between Ukrainians about various things, various issues, what people think the outcome of regional identity issues will be—the Ukrainization is taking place quicker in some places than others, you know—

CB: I feel like this is a bit euphemistic, can you explain in really simple terms what this means?

VD: What Ukrainianization taking place in different—so basically, my beloved Odessa was very ambivalent about the war, because they were deeply embedded in Russian culture and they didn’t particularly like the center, so they didn’t particularly try very hard to Ukrainianize, in either the linguistic or the cultural sense, but once the Russians started hitting the center of town with rockets—

CB: —Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.

VD: Correct. And I have a line, which I think is kind of amusing, in my piece where I say that there were many people who were ambivalent and remained ambivalent about Ukrainianization or their fidelity to the centralized Ukrainian state … even if they did not particularly agree with the Kremlin’s view that their apartments should be destroyed with cruise missiles.

CB: Right. So the debate in Kyiv about the pace of Ukrainianization, you say that it’s changed quickly—

VD: In Kyiv, it’s been the case that there have been no innovations in that debate in about a year. There are innovations in the way people are living in Kyiv, which is very interesting. They have two American patriot systems with anti-missile defense over the city, and so, unlike the rest of the country, missile defense is more or less not a problem in Kyiv, because obviously, it’s the capital and where all the ministries and everything are. They have almost total control of the airways there. unlike the rest of the country where you can get killed anytime, in Kyiv, people have more or less internalized the fact that the Russians can’t hit the city with anything except Kinzhal rockets, and even those can be sort of shot down two-thirds of the time now. So they party like it’s Tel Aviv, you know? It’s very much the part of Israelization, or the Israelification, or whatever you want to call it, of Ukraine. That the people in the capital have internalized the fact that they can go to discos and restaurants. The restaurants are full. You know, it’s really interesting.

CB: Yeah, I’ve heard that from other people too, who have been surprised by it, but of course anyone who’s been to Israel isn’t surprised by it, because that’s the classic dynamic—that people want with especial vigor to be part of life when death is so close by.

VD: Oh, absolutely. There’s a really vital element, but it’s really vital. I mean, there’s a stoicism, and a hedonism, and a camaraderie; it’s below the surface, but they know that at any moment this can be frustrated, or ruptured, by a rocket from the sky. It’s very interesting. It’s not, in any case, a form of evasion or anything of that sort. They know what’s going on. It’s not like they’re ignoring the obvious. But it’s very much like, okay, we’re gonna—

CB: —It’s completely to be expected, and of course there’s these idiotic propaganda memes on the internet to the effect of, “Look what they’re doing with our money, they’re going to discos.” Obviously anyone who has ever been anywhere near a conflict zone understands perfectly well the psychological dynamic at work … and the propaganda machine is in overdrive.

VD: People have to drink just to deal with it. People are in so much post-traumatic stress. Just three examples, I walked past a guy with a big dog and the dog was just all over the place. And it was a big fat dog. And the dog, I was trying to walk around the dog and I just, I kind of skipped and danced around the dog, but the dog was so either silly or stupid or fat that it just walked into me. And the guy just almost yelled at me, “Hey, watch my dog!” … Okay.

And then the next day, I see just a girl just walking around, poor thing, walking and just talking to herself, and just—her hands are trembling, and she was obviously mentally unstable. And my wife says to me, “There will be a lot more people like that, who are mentally fragile, who’ve been pushed over the edge.” This is just a girl in the middle of Kiev, you know?

CB: Of course, of course.

VD: So it’s a lot more mentally fragile people.

CB: It’s so goddamned unfair. People just lived their lives—and this catastrophe visits them. This catastrophe. They didn’t start, they didn’t want, they did nothing to deserve it—and these vulnerable people are attacked by this monster and it’s so goddamned unfair.

VD: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. And they’re so strong and so resilient and it’s so noble and they’re so amazing. I got there on the first night, and then I was supposed to see my friend Rebecca Harms, who’s a former German MP in the European Parliament, and we made plans to have breakfast around there in the hotel, and we embraced, and then at 3.30 in the morning the rocket alarm came—and you know, I usually ignore it, but you know it was the first time back in Kyiv for a long time so I went down into the basement of this four-star hotel.

CB: I saw the photo—

VD: There’s a photo of me lying in a parking lot and they set up these nice plush beds, really plush—

CB: Yeah, it looked very comfortable.

VD: It was very comfortable, but you’re in the middle of a very cold, freezing parking lot—

CB:—with a lot of strangers—

VD: —with a lot of strangers, and they put cookies out, and water out, and it was a very VIP way to live in a bomb shelter. I’ve been in many worse bomb shelters, much more uncomfortable. But, you know—

CB: It’s still a bomb shelter.

VD: It was still a bomb shelter. And all my Kyiv friends are like, “Oh, that’s so chic! Maybe I’ll go to the Radisson next time.” I was like, “Yeah, you should.” And people are writing me, “Oh, do they have mints on the pillows?” And then my friend, Rebecca Harms, the MP—I was thirty minutes late for breakfast because obviously I slept in the cold. And she said to me, “I saw you and I were the last ones who didn’t go up.” After they called off the alarm, I just decided to just roll over and sleep for the rest of the night in the parking lot. And she said, “I think you and I were the last ones in the parking lot.”

CB: Well, I mean, among other things, everyone’s been suffering from interrupted sleep for months and months, and that will do a number on your brain.

VD: That’s actually why the Russians shoot the rockets at three in the morning and not three in the afternoon.

CB: I mean, that’s no joke. It’s extremely difficult to retain your emotional stability if you’re not getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, basically, most nights. And I can only imagine how many people are feeling as if they’re just losing it because of that.

VD: But again, the Russians know that very well, and they’re doing that because they’re torturing the population into fleeing and surrendering, obviously.

CB: It’s become impossible to think of the Russians as anything but monsters.

VD: I mean, there’s this viciousness to what they’re doing. It’s just absolutely brutal, and brutalist, and it’s just really hard to understand for people who are not from the region.

CB: I don’t want to dehumanize any people. And I do feel that the conscripts who are being plucked up from the boonies and sent there as punishment, who are completely unwilling, are to be pitied, but—

VD: Some of them.

CB: Some of them. But the people making these decisions, and the Russians who are perfectly aware that this is happening, and celebrate it, I can’t feel anything for them but utter rage and contempt.

VD: Contempt, yeah. Contempt, yeah. Contempt is the only correct emotion.

CB: And rage. Rage.

VD: Rage and contempt. Yeah. That’s right.

CB: And I don’t like feeling this way, but I feel it all the time.

VD: Well let’s talk about the politics.

CB: Okay. First of all, Prigozhin.

VD: Oh, Prigozhin. So I left Ukraine, sadly, the day he died. And so I didn’t get to talk to Ukrainian MPs and watch their glee on the day he died. I would have preferred to have seen the glee and to have been there for the party when he died. And of course, he died on Ukrainian Independence Day.

CB: Well that’s fitting.

VD: Yeah, it was great.

CB: It’s kind of surprising, though, because, you know, Putin really likes anniversaries and you wouldn’t think he would choose that one.

VD: Well, it was the two-month anniversary of his putsch and mutiny. It wasn't the two-month anniversary of ... It wasn’t the year-long anniversary.

CB: Usually, though, he likes to give himself an assassination on his birthday or something like that. So to do it on Ukrainian Independence Day is a little bit atypical. Who the hell was stupid enough to get into a plane with him?

VD: Well, I mean, the Wall Street Journal has excellent reporting today on him returning back to Russia, frantically trying to run around and retain control of the militia as the MOD, the Ministry of Defense, was closing in and taking over. I mean, they were competing missions, he had to run around Africa talking to the same Arab and African warlords and dictators and presidents assuring them that he was still in charge just as the Deputy Minister of Defense [Yunus-Bek] Evkurov, or whatever his name is, was flying around saying from now on, this is a military-to-military, state-to-state operation and you have to stop talking to these people. So [Prigozhin] flew in just the day before from Africa and he was trying very hard to keep his corporation from being swallowed up by the states.

CB: It sounds as if he sincerely believed the promise that he would be left alone. I mean, he’d have never returned anywhere near if he didn’t.

VD: He miscalculated. I think he miscalculated. He freaked out and he was given, I think, rock-hard assurances. There were two meetings in the Kremlin with Putin, apparently. And I just think he thought that he was too important to Russian needs in Africa, obviously. This isn’t going to change anything in Niger, where I’m told by my people it was the Russian intelligence services. The GRU military intelligence guys who fomented that coup and took over that country, like in Mali.

CB: That’s worth a podcast in itself. I would love to talk to you more about that. But—

VD: Let’s put that aside. Obviously, you’re in the middle of a world-historical pivot in Africa from post-European, post-colonial stewardship. Let’s call it that.

CB: What the demise of Wagner means for Africa is such an important story and so under-covered. But I want to try to organize this podcast in a logical way. So let’s put this toward the end of it, because I want to just run through some more obvious things. What does his death mean for the war in Ukraine?

VD: The death … on the war in Ukraine, in the short term, nothing, because the Wagner guys have already been pushed off the front. They’re not fighting there anyway. So it seems that the Ministry of Defense in Russia has made a choice that the Wagner guys who participated in the coup will not be allowed to take contracts with the Defense Ministry. So, like, the 2,000 to 4,000 who actually marched on the Kremlin will probably not be allowed back into the Ministry of Defense unless that means that they can only join the newly-formed Russian mercenary units. That might mean that they can only join mercenary units and not the army proper.

CB: But is there anyone else who has ever had any success fighting there?

VD: Where? In Ukraine?

CB: Yeah.

VD: Yeah, well I mean look, not all the Russian battalions are bad. Some of them are really bad and some of them are really competent or moderately competent. The Naval Infantry is good. The Spetsnaz is fine. I think the 76th is fine. They have very competent units and then they have very green units full of mobilized men. The Kadyrovites fight fine, even though they’re more interested in taking selfies of themselves than fighting.

CB: How many Kadyrovites are there now?

VD: I mean, it’s below 20,000, I suppose. I mean, totally. I think there must be 5,000 to 7,000 now in Ukraine, from what I hear. They get taken in and out, and they often get into, like, screaming matches, fistfights, and shooting matches with Russian guys. So nobody actually wants to serve with them from the Russian army. And a lot of their job is actually to stand behind mobilized Russian conscripts and shoot them in the back if they run, so like, no one likes them—and in fact, I’ve been told over and over again by by Ukrainian officers, that are like, you know, committed to not shooting their enemies, that one of their issues is keeping their soldiers from executing Kadyrovites instead of taking them POW. So … you know, it’s an understandable problem, when someone behaves very badly.

CB: Is there any concern among the Kadyrovites that leaving home might not be a good idea because there’s no one to repress them back home?

VD: Well, I don’t talk to many Kadyrovites. The Chechens I talk to are typically on the Ukrainian side, so I have no special insight into what the Kadyrovites are thinking. It’s an interesting expansion, extension of the Chechen Civil War, but you have Chechens on both sides. And they like killing each other.

CB: Yeah, I’m sure.

VD: Often the Ukrainian Chechens ask to be on the spots on the front line where they’re killing Russian Chechens. They really like shooting at each other. It’s a great pleasure.

CB: Well, I mean, Chechnya is being held together by sheer terror, and if these are the best forces, and if they’re all out of town, doesn’t that present interesting opportunities for people who want to get rid of them?

VD: I mean, I don’t think that there is any kind of possibility at this point to get rid of him by using force. I don’t know who, internally, would be doing that. But I’m not sure that that is plausible at this point.

CB: My next question is—it’s a combination question, two questions. What is actually going on in the war? And why are we seeing these bizarre leaks from the US Defense Department? To what end are we seeing them? And what do they mean?

VD: Okay, more great questions. Okay, so obviously the counteroffensive was just not going as quickly as people want it to go, and the Ukrainians both overhyped it to themselves and to the Americans, because they needed support, and then the Americans and the media overhyped it, and then the Ukrainians felt pressure because they wanted to get gains and the gains weren’t happening quickly enough, and then the Americans started pushing them to get gains quicker, and they said, “No, we don’t want to mincemeat our soldiers, because unlike the Russians we don’t have reserves of men.” So there’s this really kind of unpleasant cycle of over-expectation, bartering for expectation, pushing for more results, resentment, followed by bad leaks from the Pentagon, followed by unpleasant resentments. You understand. You understand, I think.

CB: Yeah. I’m wondering, though, is there any truth to the planted stories that the Ukrainians are disregarding specific advice from the US and the UK and from NATO for a decisive maneuver operation, you know, sort of a Schwerpunkt initiative, in favor of smaller unit actions to attrit Russian forces—is this—do we know for sure that this was the advice they were given?

VD: This was the advice that was given. This has been widely reported and I believe it’s probably true. And also from what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard, and even from what I’ve heard from American trainers of these guys, volunteers, all— obviously there’s no on-the-ground American troops—was that the Ukrainians were just not good at combined arms maneuvers. They just couldn’t get that right. And so it was the case that at a certain point, the Ukrainians were being given the wrong kinds of strategic advice and actually—

CB: Especially because we were refusing to give them F-16s and ATACMs.

VD: Yeah, exactly. I mean, what NATO general would expect results with that kind of Iraq War I or even Iraq War II—

CB: I mean, how do you pierce their main defensive lines if you can’t hit the logistics and the supply depots?

VD: That’s right. It’s just too hard. And so the Ukrainians are like, “Let’s just go back to what we’re good at, which is using long-range attacks to attrit armor and to attrit the artillery and destroy logistics, to attrit logistical hubs, to make logistics harder, to make Russian repair and reconstruction more difficult, to get troops to collapse.” You know, these are these are very difficult choices that they have to make. These are really difficult choices—

CB: No kidding.

VD: And you know, in some ways these are roughly equal forces, in some ways, one side has morale, the other one doesn’t. One has Western intelligence, one doesn’t. One has more numbers, which is the Russians, one has the capacity to send their men to their certain death, without caring about them. One is able to replenish quicker than the other. I mean, obviously, Russia has three-and-a-half times the population. So in some ways, the Ukrainians have the upper hand, they’re fighting on their own territory; in other ways the Russians have upper hand. And so by some criteria the Ukrainians should be doing better, by other criteria, they’re fighting a really tough war—

CB: But it is not, as reported, a stalemate. The Ukrainians are making steady but slow progress.

VD: They are making steady and slow progress, and they may very well just break out somewhere in the South. And hit the Azov Sea by September, at which point they’ll be able to target Crimea with long-range artillery, right?

CB: You think that’s still plausible?

VD: It is plausible. It’s becoming less plausible, but I think it’s possible at this point that they’ll still reach the Azov Sea by the end of September. It’s not outside of the range of possibility.

CB: Did you—we republished a terrific article by one of our writers, Thomas Gregg, [also] one of our readers, comparing the situation to the one faced by the German and Allied armies in Normandy after the consolidation of the Allied bridgehead. Did you read that piece? Because I thought it was super-insightful.

VD: No, I did not. Well, tell me what he said in a few brief words and I can tell you.

CB: I can actually read the key paragraph. D-Day was 6 June 1944, and by early July that bridgehead extended from the vicinity of Caen in the east to the Atlantic Ocean south of the Cotentin Peninsula. From that point forward, the Allied objective was to break out of the bridgehead. The German objective was to prevent a breakout, or more realistically, to delay it as long as possible. The Overlord Plan had called for the early capture of the city of Caen in the high ground beyond the city, to ensure that the British Second Army sector of the bridgehead was sufficiently deep to accommodate follow-on forces in preparation for a breakout. The Germans, for their part, realized that an Allied breakout in the Caen sector would open the way to Paris and trigger the collapse of their whole line, so they fought hard to prevent that.

On D-Day and for weeks afterwards, the defenders managed to repel every British attempt to take the city. Even when Caen itself was finally captured, the Germans still clung to the high ground beyond. And you can see all these parallels here. Now this was under Montgomery, who was the primary author of Overlord, and the failure to take Caen compelled him to modify his plans. So, in his view, from then on, the British would continue to act offensively on the Allied left flank, threatening a breakout and attracting German reserves to that sector, in order to facilitate a breakout by the US First Army on the opposite flank.

The American attack was codenamed COBRA. It would go south, then east, and it would unhinge the German left flank, and if all went well, it would encircle and destroy the German defenders of Normandy, the Seventh Army facing the Americans and the Fifth Panzer Army facing the British.

VD: Yeah, that’s great. That’s absolutely great because it gives you a flavor of just the kinds of strategic choices that the Ukrainians have to make. Like, do you put half your army at Zaporizhia in order to keep the Russians from pushing into Zaporizhia while not putting enough troops on the south? Do you put all of your troops into one combined push and then you put them into a Russian kill zone? Or do you put more troops than you need to in Bakhmut in order to keep the Russians there?

CB: Exactly. It’s a really good analogy. It’s one that hadn’t occurred to me and I thought it was extremely, extremely shrewd of him to point it out. And he also points out at the time that Montgomery was taking incessant criticism He was infuriating the Americans because he was saying, “Everything’s going to plan,” and the Americans, who saw that the original scheme had failed, were beside themselves. And Churchill was just as irritated. He wanted to see [Montgomery] sacked.

But behind the scenes, as Gregg points out, the military situation was developing as Montgomery intended, and the threat in Caen forced the Germans to commit most of their Panzer divisions there, and the German strength against the Americans gradually dwindled away.

Now here’s the point of difference: The Allied air superiority was effective in isolating the battlefield by interdicting the movement of German reinforcements and supplies. So when COBRA was launched, on July 25th, the Americans soon scored a deep breakthrough, leading to the collapse of the German line. So the encirclement of the defending forces didn’t come off, but the German army in northern France was shattered. And the retreat of its remnants only came to a halt on the western border of the Reich.

Can this be done without the kind of air power brought to bear in that situation?

VD: I mean—whoops, so my computer fell on the ground. That’s okay. That happens. See, this is what happens.

CB: I didn’t even hear it.

VD: That’s good. Obviously, it’s a very similar situation, in that you have to make very, very, very complex judgments. And then also you have to lie to your allies as well as to your enemies. And the Americans and the British are micromanaging the war in a kind of uncomfortable way—but they are giving the rockets and the intelligence coordinates. So in a sense they do get a they get a veto on where the shooting takes place. I wish—I wish they would just be more patient. I wish there’d be less of these articles continuously attacking Ukraine—

CB: Alright, yeah. What the hell is that all about? That is the last thing the world—

VD: Yeah, it’s so bad. But also the casualties are so stunningly bad and so crippling to the Ukrainians that the morale in Kyiv is, kind of, a sense of understanding that every week the Ukrainian army is losing a thousand to a thousand five hundred KIA, and they can’t take those kinds of casualties for very long. So, you know, you don’t get to do this again. The Ukrainians do not have the manpower. And the West does not have the tech, the guns, the ammunition, the planes. Well, I mean, we do have the planes and the tanks, but we just don’t have the capacity to give them another shot at it.

CB: I mean, these leaks themselves are a disaster. They’re a disastrous example of the administration’s—well, I mean, there was an article about this in, I think it was The Bulwark; it was written by Eric Edelman and I can’t remember who his co-author was. Did you see it? He said—

VD: No, I didn’t. I wrote for them at the start of the war, I haven’t seen what they’ve been covering.

CB: He just published it, and it’s excellent. And they write, it’s a disastrous example of the administration—the Biden administration’s “seeming inability to understand the information environment in which the war is taking place and the requirements for sustaining public support for US engagement commitment over the long haul.”

And they’re absolutely right. They’re just handing ammunition to detractors in Congress, for allocating supplemental funding. And it’s an already parlous legislative environment, as they point out. Members from both parties are balking at approving additional support. And now they’re giving their opponents their talking points! Right? I mean, they’re saying, “Why throw good money after bad? The counter-offensive is failing.” And this is going to be endlessly repeated on Tucker Carlson and by Vivek Ramaswamy. And why are they allowing this to happen?

VD: Because they’re allowing this to happen because they want this to go away before the election. They’re allowing this to happen because they’d really like the Ukrainians either to win something big and for the Russians to sue for an armistice so this goes away before the election—

CB: If they want them to win, give them the f*****g—I’m sorry, excuse me—if you want them to win, give them the weapons they need!

VD: I couldn’t agree with you more, Claire, but I’m explaining how they think. I don’t work for the administration, thankfully. I mean, they don’t want the Ukrainians to lose, but neither do they particularly want them to win.

CB: I don’t understand this. I mean, winning would be great for the election.

VD: I don’t think that in their hearts of hearts, they do think that the Ukrainians are capable of winning before the election. I just don’t think that ... You know, there’s a great comment from ProfessorPhillips P. OBrien—

CB: Yeah, I admire him very much.

VD: He’s good, yeah. He writes, “After the last two weeks, I think Pentagon anonymous sources need a proper holiday. Not just a long weekend, but two weeks at the beach. No phone. Would be better for everybody.”

CB: These “anonymous sources” are causing real damage to American national security. Can’t they control them? Because—

VD: I think they are controlling. I think they’re doing it to shape operational and strategic expectations.

CB: But why? Why are they acting against American interests?

VD: I just think that their interest is to get re-elected. I don’t think that they think that the Ukrainians can win this.

CB: How does this get them re-elected? I mean, how does making it sound as if this is just another Afghanistan get them re-elected?

VD: It shouldn’t, but it doesn’t look great, honestly.

CB: What do you think is the narrative they’re trying to create?

VD: I think that they want to allow the public to think that they did this very well and then just have a kind of armistice somewhere around spring of 2024 before the elections really get going, so you could say, “Look, we’ve brought an honorable peace to this.” They can’t allow this to go on and on. And they know that at a certain point, Republicans will run with this and the public will get tired—

CB: An armistice? An armistice? You think they really just want an armistice that allows Russia to rearm and then take this up again as soon as they’re rested and ready?

VD: I think at a certain point, if you’re someone like Mr. Jake Sullivan or his people, you start to think, “Well, even if that is the case, we’ve destroyed 50 percent of Russian military capacity. And even if they take three, four years to rearm, by the time we’re back in office in ‘25, we’ll be able to deal with this better.” I think in their heart of hearts, they think like that.

CB: I cannot imagine thinking like that. I can’t imagine being so unpatriotic that you would think that this is going to be something that Americans will be in a position to face better then than they are now.

VD: For them this is a distraction from what they really want to focus on, China and going back to the JCPOA. The deal with the Iranians.

CB: Well, as for the latter, I have a lot to say about that. But if this is supposed to be a distraction from China—anyone with a brain can see that China is watching this.

VD: Of course.CB: And if we fail to support an ally who is an actual country, a UN member, appropriately—with whom we signed the Budapest Memorandum—the Chinese are really going to believe that we’re going to sacrifice American blood for Taiwan? Come on.

VD: Yeah.

CB: I mean, it’s just … I can’t imagine that people who have been around as long as they have, and who have as much experience as they have, and seen as much of the world as they have, and who have—in Sullivan’s case—a background in national security, who’ve read quite deeply in the field, and are being advised by some pretty smart people, I suppose, could really think this. It’s inconceivable.

VD: Yeah. It’s inconceivable. My sense of talking to people in Kyiv at the MP level, and elite bureaucrats, and strategic people is that they don’t want to look ungrateful, and they’re still thinking that things could be okay, and that they got enough—but they really, really, really want those F-16s. And if this goes badly, the population isn’t going to turn on the army. I asked a couple of MPs, “If this goes badly, will the population turn on the Army?” And they said no, but they could become very, very, very aggrieved in ways that would not be great for American standing the world.

CB: Yeah.

VD: Can you imagine what the commentary in the international media would make Americans look like if Ukrainians were saying, “Well, look, we got screwed over, we got stabbed in the back, you didn’t give us what we needed to win, now we’ve had to make this armistice with the Russians”—

CB: They don’t even need to say it, it’s just obvious! They wouldn’t even need to say it, but I mean … do you think that Ukrainians... I don’t know whether anyone would talk about this openly, but of course my first thought is, if I’m Ukrainian: “I want the Bomb.”

VD: Yeah, there was a lot of talk about restarting the Ukrainian nuclear missile program after they didn’t get what they wanted at the Vilnius NATO conference, which was some sort of rhetorical elucidation of—

CB: A lot of talk among whom?

VD: Ukrainian Twittersphere—

CB: Yeah.

VD: —Ukrainian elites mouthing off on Facebook for about 48 hours. There was a lot of talk about, “We need our own nuclear arms, blah, blah, blah.” But it was it was obviously serious, in that these are elite people. These are people in the ministries. These are high-level civil society people. These are MPs—

CB: How could they be thinking otherwise? This is another thing where I just don’t understand what the US security establishment is thinking, because it’s so obvious that this is what’s going to happen if we don’t get our fingers out of our asses—and that is it for the NPT. Poland would be next, obviously.

VD: Sure, sure.

CB: And you have an arms race.

VD: Sure, sure. I get that from Poland. I have to tell you, this example, there will never be another country ever again that willingly gives up its nuclear weapons Never.

CB: Never. Never. We now have Libya and Ukraine as the examples of what happens if you do.

VD: And to some extent South Africa.

CB: South Africa actually is the counter-example, I would say. But South Africa wasn’t facing the same security environment.

VD: Yeah, not at all. Just to say, there are three or four examples of countries who had the technical capacity to break through but did not go all the way with their nuclear program.

CB: And under these circumstances we’re trying to negotiate with Iran?

VD: Right, it’s laughable. I spent a lot of time just explaining to Ukrainian MPs and foreign MPs over the last week and a half what the effect of the Obama JCPOA was on Iran and on Israel, and they nodded gravely, and I had to explain to them—even the very smart ones who just didn’t understand how the dots linked together—that the Syrians and the Ukrainians were just collateral damage to the JCPOA.

CB: Exactly.

VD: But once I explained it to them, no one argued against me. They were like, “Yeah, yeah, that sounds right.” I had that conversation with one former and two or three current MPs over the last week and a half. And it was interesting because they’re like, “Oh, okay, that sounds right. Oh, f**k.”

CB: F**k. You know, the problem is, I just don’t see how the United States is capable, in its current condition, of pursuing an intelligible foreign policy that’s in the American and global interest, from administration to administration, given its level of not only total dysfunction and polarization, but the level of complete ignorance of the rest of the world. I mean, the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy is the most depressing thing I’ve seen since the rise of Donald Trump.

VD: Well, yeah. And in some ways he makes Donald Trump almost look noble. It’s insane.

CB: Well, at least Donald Trump is stupid enough that you can’t blame him for being stupid—he isn’t capable of understanding anything more sophisticated than what he says.

VD: And Donald Trump also has some, like, old-man, set-in-his-ways policies that he first stumbled his way into in the ‘80s. Like, you can almost kind of understand. With this Vivek guy, it’s like …. what the hell. You know?

CB: I’m not going to defend Donald Trump. But Vivek Ramaswamy is someone who is pure fraud. I mean, whatever we may say about Harvard, you don’t get to graduate cum laude from Harvard and be an idiot. And he also graduated from Yale.

VD: So you think he’s not an idiot?

CB: He’s not an idiot at all. He’s highly intelligent. And he is a complete charlatan who has seen what Trump was capable of achieving and decided he wants to do the same. And he will say whatever it takes.

VD: Well, I’m sorry that the Republican Party is in that space. But let’s talk more about Ukraine. I also just went to the Chernivtsi, the Odessa Film Festival in exile in Chernivtsi. I spent three days watching contemporary Ukrainian film and writing, and I’m putting out a piece on the state of Ukrainian film in the world now. That was interesting.

CB: What did you see?

VD: I saw, like, six documentaries. I saw three fiction films and a couple of—three or four fiction films. The Ukrainians are now screening the last of the major fiction films and non-fiction films, which were made right before the war started. So in fact I’m actually in two of them as a minor bit player. My friend has a film called Do You Love Me? Tonia Noyabrova, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian filmmaker, nice Jewish girl by the way, I’m in the film playing myself as Drunken Intellectual Number Two.

CB: Yeah, you mentioned that on the last [podcast], are any of these films—

VD: Good? Yes.

CB: —of the kind that could be shown in Europe and in the United States, and make it clear what the situation is?

VD: Well, so here’s the thing, the Ukrainians are stopping to make, if I can use that phraseology, are ceasing to make, fiction. But they’re making tons of documentaries, all of them noble, all of them well-intentioned, some of them good, some of them well-made, some of them not as great, some of them utterly brilliant, all of them very noble and well-intentioned. One that I saw was particularly melodramatic. And manipulative, actually. In the Q&A, some people accused it of being manipulative, rightly. So there are the reenactment melodrama versions of the war which are, you know, very cheap documentaries. But there are a lot of remarkable documentaries coming out of Ukraine, they will be all over the film festivals, and there will just be many many many more of them —

CB: Are they going to be widely screened in the US?

VD: I don’t know, I’m going to write about them in Tablet in my column—

CB: Are there deals with Netflix, for example?

VD: Some of them are like made-for-Ukrainian-TV quality? One was 42 minutes long and it was shown on evening Ukrainian television—all of Ukraine watches the same television because the six major TV stations joined forces for one marathon, and every Ukrainian watches the same news, which is good for stitching the population together.

CB: It’s actually, it’s really important. Because I was thinking about this. I was thinking Americans learned about the Second World War—those who didn’t fight it—from the movies. And that’s why Americans knew, have always known, that Hitler was the bad guy. And they’ve always understood the general contours of the conflict, what happened. And one of the reasons is because Jews did control Hollywood, and we did

VD: —Claire, we’re not going to be talking about the Jews controlling Hollywood.

CB: No, it’s just a fact. They were just severely, you know—they were, wildly overrepresented in Hollywood. And this ensured that a reasonably accurate portrayal of the Second World War was common to the average American. Now, of course, you don’t get all Americans sitting in front of the same film anymore It’s completely, the film environment is completely …. How would you describe it? It used to be that once upon a time, everyone went to see the same movie. Well, I guess they sort of did just now, with Oppenheimer and Barbie, but it used to be for all movies, there was this kind of simultaneous release, and then everyone was talking about the same movie.

VD: There was one culture as opposed to many.

CB: Yeah, exactly. So everyone would see The Bridge Over the River Kwai at the same time and everyone saw Schindler’s List at the same time. But this is the way to communicate with Americans in a way that they might understand the stakes a lot better than some article in Foreign Policy.

VD: Some of these documentaries are, like, not bad—Ukrainian-evening-news quality—and some of these are Oscar-level works of art. They’re really interesting. And there will be a lot more of them.

CB: Will they be accessible to Americans?

VD: I think some of them will be forgotten by time, and some of them will get lucky and will get good distribution deals. And I hope maybe my article will help with that a little bit. We’ll see.

CB: I feel such a sense of desperation at trying to counter the onslaught of Russian and fellow-traveler propaganda in the United States, which is so powerful. And you know, I don’t think Americans are bad people. I really don’t think these people in the heartland who have come to believe that Ukraine is a Nazi country that’s totally corrupt, and the Russians are the good guys, I don’t think they believe this because they’re evil people. I think they’ve just been systematically misled.

VD: Well, I mean, look, there are a lot of issues with the fact that Ukraine was just in all sorts of bad ways on the wrong side of the Trump political thing, in the last three years. Some Ukrainians behaved badly during the 2016 elections, some Ukrainians tried to intervene on behalf of—

CB: Yeah, but it’s also a massive information operation onslaught, just massive.

VD: Sure. Correct. But also, not to defend them, but I understand the National Conservatives are thinking, “Well, what’s in it for me? No one’s taking care of me. Why are we taking care of these Ukrainians?”

CB: I could sit down with any one of those national conservatives and explain what’s in it for them, and if they were—

VD: Sadly, I don’t have 50,000 Claire Berlinskis to send to every town in America.

CB: That’s the problem.

VD: If I did, the world would be a better place, but I don’t.

CB: This is what I’m preoccupied by. How can it be the case, especially because God knows why, but not one of our politicians is capable of explaining it. And I have no idea why it is that our politicians are incapable of sitting down with the American people—I mean, Biden hasn’t given one single damn speech—incapable of sitting down and explaining, “Look, here’s how the world works. Here’s what happened in the wake of the Second World War. And this is why we are prosperous and we are powerful. And it comes with certain responsibilities and obligations, and it is very much in our interest to keep up our side of the bargain, because if not, we’re going to be like any other American country, which is to say, like Mexico, or like Brazil, or like Peru. We’ll be that irrelevant and that poor. This is the world we made and we benefited from, and not only did we make it and benefit from it, so did everyone else—because you know, otherwise, the Code Pink narrative has completely infected the National Conservative side, where they’re completely willing to believe that to the extent this is true it’s because we’ve created a system of imperialism that benefits only us. And when you consider the amount of wealth and peace that the world has been blessed with since the Pax Americana, and consider going back to the world before that …. it is so horrifying. It’s so horrifying. It makes me utterly sick to think that so many Americans do not understand this. And I don’t know how to get it across to them.

VD: Yeah, I don’t either. I really don’t either. I’m hoping that, I’m hoping that this film that I worked on, that Sean Penn made, about Zelensky, which will be out on September 18—

CB: In America on September 18?

VD: The superpower film, the Sean Penn documentary about Zelensky, on which I was a producer, that is out in two weeks.

CB: In America.

VD: Yes, in America. It’s been bought by Universal, it is going to be out on Universal Plus or whatever it’s called. I forget the name of the streaming that Universal owns. I believe it’s called … it’s called … it’s called Paramount Plus. It will be streaming on September 18th. The film is done. It’s going to be great. We premiered it in Berlin. I’m in the film hanging out with Zelensky the night before with Sean Penn, right as he goes to see Zelensky. I’m with Sean Penn the night before the war having dinner with some journalists and some writers and we’re arguing—

CB: How did the audience react to it?

VD: I think the audience really enjoyed it, because it’s a really powerful film. I was at the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. There are a couple of scenes where people laugh. He really got a great sense of civil society. He got really good people into the film and it was very compelling, this film. And I think people will think the same.

CB: Chris Christie has been doing a good job. I mean, he wasn’t great in the debate, but he has been doing a good job of going to—

VD: Fine, yeah. I’d vote for him.

CB: I’d vote for him. He’s been doing a good job with—well, I can’t really forgive him for his four years of kissing Trump’s ass, but—

VD: A lot of other people did, also.

CB: It doesn’t make it right. But he would certainly be a more powerful spokesman for the global order that Americans created than Biden seems to be capable of being.

VD: Yeah, Haley and Chris Christie are the reasonable, sane, competent foreign policy wing of the of the Republican Party—

CB: Yeah, and Pence, but you know, they hate them.

VD: Well, what can you do? I mean the party will right itself. This is a Thermidorian reaction to the neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party This is a backlash. They’re trying something else. The Republican Party—

CB: What happens to Ukraine? What are people in Ukraine saying about what happens if Trump is reelected?

VD: I’m gonna put this in my piece. I went to see a bunch of MPs and I talked to a lot of them, and I went to see one of Poroshenko’s top guys. Poroshenko only has 27 MPs in parliament now. His faction is not huge, but it’s still influential. He’s in the opposition and the fact that he was winnowed down from 125 MPs to 27, he kept his best top 20 percent of his party in the slots that he got.

CB: He’s behaved well, he’s behaved honorably.

VD: Yeah, he’s fine. Yeah, he’s done very well. And I think he would have done just as well as Zelensky, although probably he wouldn’t have been as successful at channeling the country and the world into helping—

CB: Zelensky has a world historical talent for—

VD: Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

CB: In some places, yeah.

VD: And Poroshenko has only kept 20 percent of his MPs, so he kept the best top 27. So his 27 MPs are, you know, they’re talented people, right? The less talented, the less intelligent, the less powerful thinkers and orators, they were not given party seats on the list because obviously, he got wiped out in 2019.

But I talked to a bunch of his MPs. And I went to see one of his top guys, who’s very bright, and I’ve had a relationship [with him] for many years. And I said, “Are you concerned about Trump? Is everyone concerned? And he said to me, “Everybody. Everybody. Everybody.” And then emphatically one last time, the fourth time he said, “Everybody is concerned about Trump.” He said it four times.

CB: Well, rightly so. Rightly so.

VD: He said “everybody” four times, like he was crossing himself, you know?

CB: And that’s true throughout Europe. It’s true throughout Europe. I mean, do you think that if the US basically drops off the map, that there’s any possibility of Europe being able to unite itself, get itself together, and continue to provide Ukraine with what it needs?

VD: Europe simply does not have what is necessary in terms of arms production. We’re not—we’ve, by “we,” I mean the Americans, kept the Europeans from having enough arms production and military industrial plant—

CB: But there is no plan in Europe to begin producing. That’s what appalls me.

VD: Right, yeah, but there’s no plant. Even if they were going to do it, it’s not possible. With the exception of the Brits and the French. The Brits have the capacity and they’re doing stuff and they’re doing a lot of stuff secretly and they’re recalibrating their factories to make the kinds of things that the Ukrainians need. But again, it’s just not enough.

CB: You can’t tell me that an advanced technological society like Europe is incapable, if the will were there, of embarking upon a massive rearmament program.

VD: Yeah, but it’s not going to be soon enough for the Ukrainians to win the war. That’ll take two years or three years minimum. They’re buying up what they need from the South Koreans because the South Koreans make a lot, a lot of shells.

CB: And the South Koreans sure understand what’s at stake.

VD: The South Koreans are being very helpful, but it’s not enough. The amount of shells that the Ukrainians need is just gargantuan. And if the Americans fall off, it’s not apparent that the Estonians or—you know, the Latvians, who are giving like 2 percent of their GDP to the Ukrainian army. Even if you get 50 percent of the Latvian GDP to the Ukrainian army, then what? It’s still not enough.

CB: If the EU was capable of coming together for the Covid fund, and capable of coming together, not particularly well, but capable of coming together to deal with the refugee crisis and the financial crisis, surely they should be capable of coming together for something that’s about a hundred times more important.

VD: You’d think so, wouldn’t you? You’d think so.

CB: I don’t understand why they aren’t.

VD: Well, they’ve done about as well as could be expected. Some countries are worse. The Italians and, well the Germans are okay now. The Hungarians are, of course, a problem.

CB: So the Germans are not really okay. Are you looking at the statistics on the AfD?

VD: Well, I mean, that is real. But I mean, they’ve started giving a lot of weapons and a lot of support. I mean, it’s not anywhere where it should be. And it took a year longer than necessary. But, you know, again, the closer you are to the Russian border, the more you’re willing to give up one or two percent of your GDP to the Ukrainian army. That’s obvious. But again, it’s about the Americans. It’s just not there. The capacity is not there. It’s an American fight, you know.

CB: But I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why there’s not absolute panic. Why there’s not a realistic understanding that Trump could win. Why they don’t see this as a life and death issue—which it is.

VD: It is, yes.

CB: Most people, when someone mugs them in a dark alley and puts a knife against their throats, have a fight-or-flight reaction. Where’s the fight-or-flight reaction? Where’s the adrenaline dump?

VD: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know, noble Claire, I just don’t know.

CB: Who would know? Who could explain this to us?

VD: I mean, you really have to go country by country to talk to different Europeans. I think that a lot of European bureaucracy is starting to understand in a way that they didn’t a year ago. Even Macron really, I think, based on my conversations with people who talked to him and his people, they really understand that the Russians need to lose now. I think Macron really changed.

CB: Yeah, Macron has, you know, he has come around with the vigor of a convert.

VD: Yeah, that’s really interesting. That was not the case three months into the war.

CB: No, it sure wasn’t.It sure wasn’t.

CB: He has just ... he’s had a come to Jesus moment. I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but he gets it now.

VD: He does get it, and I think if you’d been the one ...

CB Maybe from Africa?

VD: Yeah, and too little too late. I mean, the French really screwed that up. I mean, it’s a really big problem, for the French especially, because this is their backyard and it’s their nuclear energy—for the resources that they need was coming from Africa.

CB: Yeah, well, they’ve lost Françafrique. And that’s, I mean, that is a stunning loss. It’s a stunning loss and part of it is entirely their fault. But another part of it is Russia’s fault.

VD. Well, I mean, they were told. By French intelligence. “You should just rush the gendarmes, the special forces to surround the palace,” you know, and they didn’t do it.

CB: Were they? I thought the controversy was they weren’t told by the intelligence.

VD: There’s different views on that, but I think they made the wrong decision at the wrong moment. They could have stepped in. And, you know, there are American bases there. I mean, the Americans use that country to fight terrorism all over the region.

CB: I know.

VD: Also, very badly. Terrorist attacks are up like 30,000 percent since the American bases opened up.

CB: Yeah, I mean, causation isn’t correlation, but certainly whatever the West has been trying is not working. And this is a huge problem. It’s never, ever reported anywhere in the US. I mean, it’s ISIS redux all over a, again, a completely innocent population is being brutalized. Brutalized isn’t even strong enough. It’s being massacred, it’s being tortured, and no one cares. No one cares. And now we’ve lost a very significant military base. And I don’t think Biden’s calling attention to it because, you know, it’s not the sort of thing you want to advertise, but it’s a foreign policy setback on the order of losing Afghanistan.

VD: Yeah, it’s like the closing of the third American embassy in the course of a year and a half, you know? Like Kabul, then Kyiv, which obviously is thankfully working again, on a voluntary basis—nobody’s working there who doesn’t want to be there, and they’re working really hard, and they’re really, you know, overpowered—but they’re doing their best. And now they’ve lost in just a year and a half, what is it, three American embassies had to be shut down? That’s kind of a catastrophe in terms of running foreign policy.

CB: It is a catastrophe. And this is the moment, with Wagner’s fate up in the air, to be trying to recoup those losses.

VD: Yeah, I think it’s a bit too late. I think the Russians have made inroads. And also, just like—I think the Africans—well, there isn’t one African polity or group, but I think a lot of—

CB: Well, there is almost like a single African when it comes to France. They just hate France.

VD: Yeah, I guess that’s right. Yeah, you look at you look at Libya where the Russians are doing very well, you look at Mali, you look at Central African Republic, you look, major Russian inroads everywhere, the Egyptians are are back on board with the Russians … it’s just a catastrophe. We’re just losing. It really is like a domino effect—

CB: Yeah.

VD: —like the Vietnam-era domino effect, all over again. In some ways it’s like the Soviet Union minus communism, you know—

CB: And I just don’t think we are fully appreciating the effect of the information operations. I mean, the French certainly have screwed themselves. And also there’s, you know—the colonial past has an infinite power over people’s minds. But it doesn’t help that Macron has been just stupid in the way he’s approached them. I mean, Macron has a particular gift for alienating people and for not understanding the sensitivities of a situation. So, I mean, in part you can blame the French for their own fate, but the bulk of Russian information operations are being directed toward Africa, and they work. They work.

VD: They’re doing fine, yeah. They’re doing very well. I mean, this was a coordinated operation. Niger, I’m told, by people who know a lot about it, took six months.

CB: What else did you hear?

VD: That the French were caught flat-footed, that the French were being squeezed out. I mean, they got rid of the French ambassador, they got rid of the American ambassador very quickly. The African countries around who were willing to send in a force were told by Nigeria to stand down. It’s just—I know that the word “shitshow” was popularized and made bourgeois by one Barack Hussein Obama, but let’s call it a shitshow.

CB: Yeah. Well, the ECOWAS intervention idea was lunacy from the beginning. But the signs were there beforehand and people weren’t paying attention to them. They weren’t taking them seriously. And why they weren’t taking them seriously after everything that's happened, I do not know.

VD: I don’t know. Maybe Ukraine, Russia, distracted a lot of people. I just don't know. Maybe we really can’t chew—

CB: —can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?

VD: Yeah. Maybe we can only look at one part of the world at the same time.

CB: But we have—different parts of our bureaucracy are dedicated to this. We have Africa Desks in the intelligence agencies, in the Defense Department, in the State Department, we have—

VD: —sure, but then you have to get the army and the civilian command to make decisions based on that information. You could have perfect information on the Africa Desk and then no one does anything about it because the political elite just doesn’t have enough bandwidth to concentrate or isn’t smart enough to know what they should be doing somewhere.

CB: But I mean, we used to be able to do this. Nixon would not have allowed this to fly under the radar.

VD: Totally. And that’s right. I mean, and even in many ways, Reagan wouldn’t have.

CB: No, not at all.

VD: Even Clinton probably wouldn’t have dropped the ball on something like this either.

CB: Yeah, I don’t think he would have. And certainly Bush wouldn’t have. The first Bush wouldn’t have.

VD: First Bush was not the kind of man who would not have been able to concentrate on four or five different policy areas at once. Yeah. Let’s start wrapping up because it’s getting late here. Anything else you want to ask?

CB: Checking my list of questions so that I haven’t forgotten something important. I have on my list, “Can Ukraine do this without the materiel they need?” Do they have—is it theoretically possible for them to push Russia out with what they have?

VD: I think it’s very difficult. I think they could push them out of particular areas and make Crimea unlivable, and make the Russians, in certain instances, come to their senses and make a deal. But obviously they need some sort of pervasive victory. Otherwise, the Russians are just not going to take the lessons that they need to and decommunize and de-imperialize, or whatever … de-de … using all the “de-” words. Obviously, it will be a Black Swan event that brings this to an end. That cannot be predicted by anybody. I’m sure it’s not going to be a coup d’état or a revolt of Russian elites as people keep—

CB: Who did you speak to in Ukraine?

VD: Sorry?

CB: Who did you speak to in Ukraine?

VD: I talked to a lot of people. I talked to ... I tried to talk to ordinary people, also. I went and I saw some old male friends I hadn't seen in a while, just regular guys who I like. One of them was telling me what he was doing to avoid conscription. Just a nice coffee with an ordinary pal I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. He lost his job in logistics and he had to work shucking oysters and he was just telling me that he was just really concerned about conscription. He didn’t want to go to fight. There’s a lot of guys like that.

I talked to intellectuals. I talked to a well-known philosopher. I talked to policy people. I talked to some diplomats. I saw six to eight former and current MPs in a week. I saw a former finance minister. I saw a former minister for foreign affairs, I saw some government people, think tank people. You know, I make the rounds.

CB: Among the higher-level people, the people who might actually know what's going on and be in charge of making policy, what five adjectives would you say describe their state of mind?

VD: Oh, that’s such a great question. … One, befuddlement. Two, stoicism. Three, resignation. Four, leniency, with the army and American elites and even with me, the way I was talking to them.

CB: Leniency, you mean like indulgence?

VD: Yeah, just like understanding. Like, okay, you know—I asked a former national security advisor who had also been a finance minister—it’s actually entirely obvious to Ukraine hands who this is—I said to him, “So, are you resentful of the Americans?” And he had to think for a second, and he was like, “Actually, not really.” He said, “Ultimately, they could be doing more, but you know, they’re doing enough, and we’re doing our best.” He was actually wearing fatigues. He was in the middle of—you know, he was actually wearing fatigues and fighting. I ran into him in my hotel and we sat down, we had lunch, and whatever … he was taking calls, buying up drones, between talking to me and doing deals for drones. So he had left civilian life and political life in order to go into the army.

Among Zelensky’s opponents, there’s a lot of frustration. Politics is about to start up again. Politics was submerged for a long time and it was taboo. But the taboo on politics is about to come off.

CB: How so?

VD: There’s a lot of the beginnings of maneuvering. It’s been two, three months where Ukrainian internal politics has begun to rekindle. You can’t really go out and criticize the president or the foreign minister or Yermak or any of these people yet. But you can—

CB: What’s the gravamen of the complaint?

VD: Well, the Poroshenko people have sort of hysterical complaints about this being a dictatorship and blah blah blah. And they have a point that, you know, they’re not being really consulted with. But you do have martial law, and Zelensky does have a supermajority in parliament, so you don’t really need to consult with an opposition that has 27 seats, you know? Or 15 seats, in another party.

And that, you know, there’s internal ... I’m almost skeptical about relaying these things because it’s a lot of the usual b******g, but they will have rather overblown and overwrought versions of reasonable complaints.

CB: But are they complaining about the way the war has been prosecuted?

VD: No, no, no, they’re not. No, no one is.

CB: Right.

VD: No one is. No, no one is criticizing the army. No one is criticizing Zelensky’s decisions. It’s entirely about internal stuff, like corruption, or—and Zelensky is trying to fight corruption.

CB: He is coming out swinging against it.

VD: Well, yeah, Burns went in there, the CIA guy, telling him you have to go hard against corruption, because for a long time the West was looking the other way, because we didn’t want to delegitimize the Ukrainian state in the middle of a war. It’s a really difficult thing—are you going to criticize the Ukrainians about corruption in the middle of a war? Obviously, Zelensky’s not corrupt. And Ukraine being what it is, there is corruption and they’re doing what they can. They’re trying to make corruption treasonous in the middle of a war.

CB: Yeah, I just read that this morning.

VD: And it’s very controversial, because if you call it treason, that’s something that goes not to the anti-corruption court, but to the security services which are controlled by the executive branch, so that is a checks-and-balances issue. I mean, obviously, I think corruption is treasonous in the middle of a war, but if you give it to the internal intelligence services to decide what that means as opposed to the anti—

CB: Well, it’s definitely treasonous, because it’s treasonous inherently, because it’s detracting from the war effort, but it’s also being used as propaganda—

VD: Totally. Yeah, totally. It is treasonous. I mean, I agree. And Zelensky saw that a lot of young men on the front were resentful of other young men who were not on the front paying US$6,000 to get out.

CB: Imagine that, yeah, of course, of course.

VD: Of course they were. Like, you’re fighting and dying and giving up your health in the trenches and some kid from a wealthier family than yours gives up US$10,000 to an army recruiter—

CB: Yeah, that’s outrageous.

VD: And Zelensky fired, unilaterally, every head of recruitment—-

CB: Yeah, yeah. Head of the regional recruitment offices, yeah, I saw that.

VD: And that was very popular, but that was that was an internal move that wasn’t for external consumption. That was to make people internally understand that they were fighting corruption. It was a good move.

CB: It was a good move externally too, though.

VD: I don’t know, you tell me.

CB: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know whether anyone in the US pays the slightest bit of attention to the actual news from Ukraine or whether they just get it all from, you know, Gateway Pundit. All right, before we wrap up, what would you—what are the five things you would like our listeners to understand about the situation that you think they might not know?

VD: Five things. Oh, like five more adjectives. Okay, one, the Ukrainians will not blame themselves or blame their troops or their generals for things going wrong. Things could still go wrong. The Russians famously do very bad at the beginning of the wars and then they get their stuff together, and then they beat back the French or the Germans.

CB: Or the Finns. Exactly.

VD: They’re famously haphazardly organized and really bad at the beginning of a conflict and then they get it together. So you just have to keep with the Ukrainians for another year and a half.

Two, any conversation about a ceasefire outside of the Ukrainians’ timetable puts lives at risk, because it makes the generals have to rush battles when the civilian elites tell them, “Look, you really have to deliver something or else the Americans, or Trump, or whoever, are going to stop delivering weapons.”

CB: And it encourages Putin.

VD: Yeah, it encourages Putin. So all the stuff about a ceasefire and putting pressure on the Ukrainians to negotiate, that is almost sadistically terrible. It’s almost horrible.

CB: Yeah.

VD: Three, the Ukrainians are running out of men. They’re really running out of men who are willing to fight. Everyone who wanted to go fight is already out the front and many of them are already dead. Ukraine does not have reserves of manpower. It just does not. The Russians do. The Russians are capable of full mobilization, of war mobilization, of conscription, of sending more ethnic minorities to fight. They are willing to grind this out. The Ukrainians are going to run out of men, men and women, sooner rather than later. So that’s where we are. That’s number three. Number four …. You know, this really … well, I wanna say something cliche about changing the world historical order, blah blah blah … Let’s skip that.

CB: No, let’s not. This is a pivot point. It is the most important story in the world. And the next century, at least, will be determined by the outcome. And if Americans do the wrong thing, the consequences will be so dark, so unfathomably dark for so many millions of people, for so long, that—61 percent of the people listening are Americans, according to my stats, and I just want them to understand that this is so much more important than any other issue that’s being discussed in the US right now.

VD: Yeah, it really—I mean, I don’t know. I really am a one-issue voter at this point—

CB: Me too.

VD: —so maybe my perspective’s being, you know, I have skin in the game, I have family in the game—

CB: I don’t. But I feel the same way.

VD: I’m glad to hear that. Aren’t I your family, Claire, in a way?

CB: Yes, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, if you told me the most important issue in the world right now was—I don’t know—fusion power, I would say, “Yeah, that’s a nice hobby horse and maybe it’ll happen,” but I wouldn’t get as excited—well, fusion power would be a really big deal. And that’s a bad example.

VD: Let’s try alien invasion. The alien invasion really puts this Ukrainian-Russian thing to—

CB: Okay, no, no these are bad examples. Let’s choose a good example. If you told me the most important issue was transgender bathrooms, okay, I mean—I’d say “Yeah, with you with the transgender bathrooms, but it just doesn’t matter compared to this.”

VD: Correct. Transgender bathrooms matter somewhat to some people in some places and it’s—

CB: —we’ll get that sorted sooner or later, but the world does not depend on getting it right.

VD: I do want to figure that out, in some way, but it’s not, it will not determine the course of our civilization, liberty and all that, in the way … This war really is good against evil. I despise when people use that rhetoric, but—

CB: —But this is the clearest case of it we’ve seen since Hitler.

VD: Correct. In every other conflict, everyone has a point. The Russians have no point in this situation.

CB: I want to caution Americans that anyone who tells them otherwise is never to be listened to or trusted again.

VD: Yeah, Mr. Tucker Carlson has a lot to answer for.

CB: And Vivek Ramaswamy. And yeah, I mean, it’s a bright line.

VD: They’re opportunists, they’re grifters and opportunists. Last question, what do you think? Last point, last question?

CB: No, I want your view about what is the last point that you don’t think they know.

VD: Last point that they don’t think they know.

CB: That you don’t think they already know. The thing you want to communicate. that you think they might not know, about what’s going on.

VD: You know, the traumatic stress that is on a society, I think, will spread into Europe, and I think will demoralize Europe.

CB: You mean literally, in terms of the refugees? Or—

VD: Yeah, I mean there are eight, there are like six to eight million Ukrainians, or five million, or whatever, I mean that’s between 1-2 percent, that’s not nothing. They’re obviously grouped in some countries, not others; they’re obviously in Romania and Poland, and Germany. There’s a million, there’s a million Ukrainians in Germany, and half of them have been honest to pollsters that they’re not going back.

CB: Or in a larger sense that Europeans, even if they don’t consciously admit it to themselves, understand that if Ukraine falls, they’re next?

VD: Well, I think it could very well in a couple of years, if Ukraine falls, make NATO obsolete. And, I mean, the Russians will try some salami-style tactics on Latvia or Lithuania or Estonia or whatever.

CB: Oh, absolutely.

VD: But I just think that that kind of trauma, with six to eight million people, and if the Ukrainian state falls, there will be, obviously, millions more refugees into Europe. I think it will just do something to demoralize the European project.

CB: Well, you know that shudder of horror that you always feel when you read First World War poetry?

VD: Yes.

CB: When you read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” those lines, and you think about it, and you think about the trenches, and you think about the gas masks, and how it gives you that shiver, that kind of sense of a hand coming from the grave around your neck. That’s happening for real, right now.

VD: It’s happening for real, it's happening to my friends, to my family, to everybody that I know. And again, if this war is fought successfully from the Russian side, this is just going to be a crippling add-on effect to a really bad ten years for the European Union. You have 2015, Syrian refugee crisis, then you have the Germans and the Greeks, then you have Brexit, then you have Trump and NATO. It’s like body blow after body blow after body blow every couple of years, right? And how many of these body blows can an institutional idea which is based on an optimistic, humane, idealistic view of the future—how many such body blows can it take? I think this will just maybe tip the European project over. You think I’m wrong?

CB: And I want to interject here. There is a large cohort of Americans who will say, “Well, so what? Why do we care about Europe? We pulled their chestnuts out of the fire twice in the last century. It’s time for them to go it alone. Why is this our business?” And I would answer—

VD: —Why is it our business, Claire?

CB: —Because it’s the West. Because this is us.

VD: This is us. Yes. Americans are descendants of the European project.

CB: This is our people. And the difference between America and Europe is—any belief that there’s a difference is the narcissism of small differences. This is the Western tradition. This is where we come from. This is where what we believe comes from.

VD: Like the Latin Empire protecting the Greeks because that was their patrimony and their historical—

CB: Exactly. And, you know, with our allies, we are mighty. With American allies, we do not need to worry about China and Russia. Together, we are so much more powerful. But if they break us up, they win, and the world belongs to despots, tyrants, and authoritarians. And the whole thing is ever so much more sinister, as Churchill said, by the lights of perverted science.

VD: Amen, Claire. Amen. And I think I cannot possibly say anything more honest or correct or germane or articulate. So I’m going to say thank you so much for having me on again. I hope I’ve said something of interest and I’ll see you Sunday, yeah?

CB: Yeah, yeah. I’ll see you Sunday and bring anyone you want.

VD: I’ll only bring nice people.

CB: Okay. Here’s a hug for you.

VD: Thank you to all our listeners for listening to us. Bye bye.

CB: Bye bye.

If you enjoyed listening to this Cosmopolicast, you might also enjoy these earlier conversations between Claire and Vladislav:

* The CosmoRussyaCast (feat. Monique Camara, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Scott Abel, and Jon Nighswander)

* The View from Kyiv (feat. Olga Tokariuk)

* From Kyiv to Chernowitz Vladislav rescues his relatives.

* The News from Odessa (feat. Monique Camara and Vivek Kelkar)

* Burning Vlad’s Russian Passport (feat. Toomas Hendrik Ilves)

* Ukraine and the Ghosts of the Iraq War

* The Angels and Demons of Odessa (feat. David Patrikarikos)

* Ukraine, Russia, the War, and the West (feat. Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon)

* The Ukrainian Literature Cosmopolicast (feat. Kate Tsurkan)

* The Counteroffensive and the Dam

* What the Hell was That? (feat. Ariel Cohen) On the Prigozhin mutiny.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Please join me in lavishly thanking our reader Michael Greenspan for donating his time today to helping me edit this podcast. I’m so grateful for the favor, and you will be too when you listen without hearing Vladislav and me ask each other repeatedly, “Are you still there? Still there?”

To follow along, I recommend looking at the Ukraine Livemap, which is an invaluable resource for visualizing the war and following the news in real time:

Here’s Vladislav’s book: From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays from Post-Soviet Ukraine.

Here’s his Cannes Diary.

Here’s the intercept in question:

Here’s the speech Ronald Reagan gave after the Soviet attack on KAL 007—the kind of speech Biden should be giving, but can’t.

Don’t miss David Patrikarikos’s report from Odessa:

Thousands are trapped in the flood zone — an estimated 230 square miles — and thousands of animals are dead. It is the single most damaging act of the war so far. “This is hell—but instead of fire we have water,” a local told me yesterday, before adding, as the people here so often do: “F****** Russians.”

Reports of fresh horrors reach me almost hourly. Contacts send videos and images of everything from sofas to the corpses of pets floating through towns and cities. Many of the elderly, disabled and those with large families, are trapped.

Some are contemplating the prospect of either a quick death by drowning, or the agony of a slower end if no one can reach them.

Even by the standards of this war, what is unfolding out here is horrific.

(Clearly the reports of “five dead” are completely inaccurate—some kind of artifact of the way they’re being recorded, not reality.)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Please join me in lavishly thanking our reader Michael Greenspan for donating his time today to helping me edit this podcast. I’m so grateful for the favor, and you will be too when you listen without hearing Vladislav and me ask each other repeatedly, “Are you still there? Still there?”

To follow along, I recommend looking at the Ukraine Livemap, which is an invaluable resource for visualizing the war and following the news in real time:

Here’s Vladislav’s book: From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays from Post-Soviet Ukraine.

Here’s his Cannes Diary.

Here’s the intercept in question:

Here’s the speech Ronald Reagan gave after the Soviet attack on KAL 007—the kind of speech Biden should be giving, but can’t.

Don’t miss David Patrikarikos’s report from Odessa:

Thousands are trapped in the flood zone — an estimated 230 square miles — and thousands of animals are dead. It is the single most damaging act of the war so far. “This is hell—but instead of fire we have water,” a local told me yesterday, before adding, as the people here so often do: “F****** Russians.”

Reports of fresh horrors reach me almost hourly. Contacts send videos and images of everything from sofas to the corpses of pets floating through towns and cities. Many of the elderly, disabled and those with large families, are trapped.

Some are contemplating the prospect of either a quick death by drowning, or the agony of a slower end if no one can reach them.

Even by the standards of this war, what is unfolding out here is horrific.

(Clearly the reports of “five dead” are completely inaccurate—some kind of artifact of the way they’re being recorded, not reality.)

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“ … unfortunately we show that the AI control problem is not solvable and the best we can hope for is safer AI, but ultimately not 100 percent safe AI, which is not a sufficient level of safety in the domain of existential risk as it pertains to humanity.”

—Roman Yampolsky

Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist and professor at the Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville who works on genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence, and the alignment problem.

Our conversation surprised me for two reasons. First, he’s the only researcher to whom I’ve spoken who argues that GPT4 is conscious. Second—much more gravely—he believes that we’ll not only fail to solve the control problem before we build a dangerously intelligent AI, but that the problem is inherently and formally insoluble.

As I’ve reflected on control problem this week, I’ve had the growing and uneasy suspicion that this must be so. That said, had you told me five years ago what Large Language Models would be doing in 2023, I would have said that was impossible, too. My intuitions about which problems in AI engineering are soluble aren’t trustworthy. It takes years of working on problems like these to develop good intuitions, and I haven’t done that.

That can’t be said of Roman, however. This is his life’s work. We have every good reason to take his intuitions seriously. So when I heard him say that, my heart sank. He may be wrong, he tried to reassure me. He hopes he is. I hope he is. But he doesn’t think he is.

… Nothing should be taken off the table and limited moratoriums and even partial bans on certain types of AI technology should be considered. “The possibility of creating a superintelligent machine that is ethically inadequate should be treated like a bomb that could destroy our planet. Even just planning to construct such a device is effectively conspiring to commit a crime against humanity.” Finally, just like the incompleteness results did not reduce the efforts of the mathematical community or render it irrelevant, the limited results reported in this paper should not serve as an excuse for AI safety researchers to give up and surrender. Rather, it is a reason for more people to dig deeper, and to increase effort and funding for AI safety and security research. We may not ever get to 100 percent safe AI but we can make AI safer in proportion to our efforts, which is a lot better than doing nothing.

It is only for a few years right before AGI is created that a single person has a chance to influence the development of superintelligence, and by extension the forever future of the whole world. This is not the case for billions of years from Big Bang until that moment and it is never an option again. Given the total lifespan of the universe, the chance that one will exist exactly in this narrow moment of maximum impact is infinitely small, yet here we are. We need to use this opportunity wisely.

—Roman Yampolsky

Our conversation was perfectly calm, as you’ll hear, but that’s because I just can’t bring myself to believe in any of this, despite the evidence. This exchange and its implications seem no more real to me than a thought experiment in a graduate philosophy seminar or a science fiction movie. That I feel this way shows that awareness of one’s cognitive biases is no proof against them. In reality, it’s neither a thought experiment nor a movie; it’s perfectly plausible that he’s right, and if so, we’re in indescribably big trouble.

As hard as it is to take this in, we have to, because this hasn’t happened yet. It may be difficult to stop it at this point, but at least it’s not formally impossible. Once it happens? Too late.

So it’s worth thinking about now.

More by Roman Yampolsky:

On the controllability of artificial intelligence: an analysis of limitations:

… The unprecedented progress in artificial intelligence over the last decade came alongside multiple AI failures and cases of dual use, causing a realization that it is not sufficient to create highly capable machines, but that it is even more important to make sure that intelligent machines are beneficial for humanity. This led to the birth of the new sub-field of research commonly known as AI safety and security with hundreds of papers and books published annually on the different aspects of the problem.

All such research is done under the assumption that the problem of controlling highly capable intelligent machines is solvable, which has not been established by any rigorous means. However, it is a standard practice in computer science to first show that a problem doesn’t belong to a class of unsolvable problems before investing resources into trying to solve it or deciding what approaches to try. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge no mathematical proof or even rigorous argumentation has been published demonstrating that the AI control problem may be solvable, even in principle, much less in practice. …

Yudkowsky considers the possibility that the control problem is not solvable, but correctly insists that we should study the problem in great detail before accepting such a grave limitation. He writes:

“One common reaction I encounter is for people to immediately declare that Friendly AI is an impossibility, because any sufficiently powerful AI will be able to modify its own source code to break any constraints placed upon it… But one ought to think about a challenge, and study it in the best available technical detail, before declaring it impossible—especially if great stakes depend upon the answer. It is disrespectful to human ingenuity to declare a challenge unsolvable without taking a close look and exercising creativity. It is an enormously strong statement to say that you cannot do a thing—that you cannot build a heavier-than-air flying machine, that you cannot get useful energy from nuclear reactions, that you cannot fly to the Moon. Such statements are universal generalizations, quantified over every single approach that anyone ever has or ever will think up for solving the problem. It only takes a single counterexample to falsify a universal quantifier. The statement that Friendly (or friendly) AI is theoretically impossible, dares to quantify over every possible mind design and every possible optimization process —including human beings, who are also minds, some of whom are nice and wish they were nicer. At this point there are any number of vaguely plausible reasons why Friendly AI might be humanly impossible, and it is still more likely that the problem is solvable but no one will get around to solving it in time. But one should not so quickly write off the challenge, especially considering the stakes.”

Yudkowsky further clarifies meaning of the word impossible:

“I realized that the word ‘impossible’ had two usages:

* Mathematical proof of impossibility conditional on specified axioms.

* I can’t see any way to do that.”

Needless to say, all my own uses of the word “impossible” had been of the second type.

In this paper we attempt to shift our attention to the impossibility of the first type, provide rigorous analysis and argumentation and where possible mathematical proofs, but unfortunately we show that the AI control problem is not solvable and the best we can hope for is safer AI, but ultimately not 100 percent safe AI, which is not a sufficient level of safety in the domain of existential risk as it pertains to humanity.

Detecting qualia in natural and artificial agents:

In this paper, we described a reductionist theory for appearance of qualia in agents based on a fully materialistic explanation for subjective states of mind, an attempt at a solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness. We defined a test for detecting experiences and showed how computers can be made conscious in terms of having qualia. Finally, we looked at implications of being able to detect and generate qualia in artificial intelligence. Should our test indicate presence of complex qualia in software or animals certain protections and rights would be appropriate to grant to such agents. …

… There seems to be a fundamental connection between intelligence, consciousness and liveliness beyond the fact that all three are notoriously difficult to define. We believe that ability to experience is directly proportionate to one’s intelligence and that such intelligent and conscious agents are necessarily alive to the same degree. As all three come in degrees, it is likely that they have gradually evolved together. Modern narrow AIs are very low in general intelligence and so are also very low in their ability to experience or their perceived liveness. Higher primates have significant (but not complete) general intelligence and so can experience complex stimuli and are very much alive. Future machines will be superintelligent, superconscious and by extension alive!

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